A Quote by Vine Deloria Jr.

As time passed I became an avid reader of popular scientific books, wanting to know as much as I could about the world in which I lived. Gradually I began to see a pattern of nonsense in much scientific writing. Scientific explanations given regarding the origins or functioning of various phenomena simply didn't make sense.
The scientific method is the ultimate elegant explanation. It is the ultimate foundation for anything worthy of the name "explanation". It makes no sense to talk about explanations without having a process for deciding which are right and which are wrong, and in a broad sense that is what the scientific method is about. All of the other wonderful explanations celebrated here owe their origin and credibility to the process by which they are verified-the scientific method.
My greatest surprise was that so much of what we think is common sense is just prejudice, and so much of what we think is scientific fact is about as scientific as the idea that the sun revolves around the earth.
[About John Evershed] There is much in our medallist's career which is a reminder of the scientific life of Sir William Huggins. They come from the same English neighbourhood and began as amateurs of the best kind. They both possess the same kind of scientific aptitude.
One of the greatest accomplishments of Western civilization is the development of the scientific method and the scientific disposition, which entail the development of falsifiable hypotheses about the world and the unwillingness to take unverified and untheorized claims about the world as truth, simply because someone states that they are true.
Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading.
There aren't sufficient scientific facts to establish the theory of evolution, and it deals with the origins of man, which is more from a philosophical standpoint than a scientific standpoint.
In the 1980s a small group of individuals became concerned about the Earth's temperature and what it might do in the future. I hesitate to call them scientists because they have abandoned their scientific principals by which their guess about temperature increases and the cause could achieve scientific acceptance or rejection.
How could you ask me to believe in God when there's absolutely no evidence that I can see? I do believe in the beauty and the awe-inspiring mystery of the science that's out there that we haven't discovered yet, that there are scientific explanations for phenomena that we call mystical because we don't know any better.
We should stop the non-scientific, pseudo-scientific, and anti-scientific nonsense emanating from the right wing, and start demanding immediate action to reduce global warming and prevent catastrophic climate change that may be on our horizon now. We must not let the [Bush] Administration distort science and rewrite and manipulate scientific reports in other areas. We must not let it turn the Environmental Protection Agency into the Environmental Pollution Agency.
For example, there are numbers of chemists who occupy themselves exclusively with the study of dyestuffs. They discover facts that are useful to scientific chemistry; but they do not rank as genuine scientific men. The genuine scientific chemist cares just as much to learn about erbium-the extreme rarity of which renders it commercially unimportant-as he does about iron. He is more eager to learn about erbium if the knowledge of it would do more to complete his conception of the Periodic Law, which expresses the mutual relations of the elements.
The need for general scientific understanding by the public has never been larger, and the penalty for scientific illiteracy never harsher. Lack of scientific fundamentals causes people to make foolish decisions about issues such as the toxicity of chemicals, the efficacy of medicines, the changes in the global climate.
We hear a lot about theological justifications for the conflicts, but very little about the scientific evidence, which in no way supports them. The time period in which Moses was leading his people out of Egypt, into the Promised Land, the Promised Land was Egypt. We know that. Archaeological records are very clear. The Egyptians were avid bureaucrats even in those days and kept very scrupulous records. I think it's important for us to realize this conflict is built on a legend. It has no scientific support.
Global warming has long since passed from scientific hypothesis to the realm of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.
The traditional boundaries between various fields of science are rapidly disappearing and what is more important science does not know any national borders. The scientists of the world are forming an invisible network with a very free flow of scientific information - a freedom accepted by the countries of the world irrespective of political systems or religions. ... Great care must be taken that the scientific network is utilized only for scientific purposes - if it gets involved in political questions it loses its special status and utility as a nonpolitical force for development.
Moreover, only a strong and united scientific opinion imposing the intrinsic value of scientific progress on society at large can elicit the support of scientific inquiry by the general public.
Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.
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