Here are eight quotes indicating the importance of a scientific approach to religion:
Quote#1 on scientific progress:
"Sir Hermann Bondi once wrote that so-called scientific progress does not consist so much in an advancement in science but rather in taking something that beforehand was not science and making it become a part of science itself."
Paolo Rossi: In Scientific Culture in the Contemporary World, V. Mathieu and P. Rossi ,eds. (Scientia, Milano, 1979)3.
Quote#2 on honesty:
"..... the scientific researcher is not by nature a more honest man than the ignoramus. He is somebody who has voluntarily locked himself inside rules that condemn him, so to speak, to honesty. A particular ignoramus may tempermentally be more honest than such-and-such a scientist. In disciplines that cannot by their very nature provide total demonstrable constraint, imposing itself from outside on the researcher's subjectivity - for example, the social sciences and history - we often see, alas, the flourishing of lightheadedness, insincerity, the ideological manipulation of facts, and the tendentiousness of clan rivalries, which occasionally take precedence over the pure love of truth by which such researchers are supposedly consumed."
From Jean Francoise Revel, The Flight from Truth (Random House, NY, 1991),8-9.
Quote#3 on the importance of theory.
(For example, the importance of a
theory of consciousness
to the cognitive neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers
of mind who are now engaged in the emerging field of consciousness studies.):
"I may have thought that you can deduce theories from experiments, but it's nonsense. On the contrary ... theory tells you what it is you should be observing."
An Einstein comment to Heisenberg, retold by Gerald Holton in an article in the Harvard Gazette, Oct 2, 1992.
Quote#4 on the advantage of using mathematics for studying religious phenomena:
"....... mathematics is not just another language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning; it is like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning. It is in fact a big collection of the results of some person's careful thought and reasoning. By mathematics it is possible to connect one statement to another. ....... However, if you do not appreciate the mathematics, you can not see, among the great variety of facts, that logic permits you to go from one to the other."
From Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (MIT Press Paperback Edition, Cambridge, MA., 1967) pp40-41.
Quote#5 on the arrogance of science toward the mystic.
"It is easy, from the stand-point of acquired practical competence, to deride a merely imaginative life. Dirision, however, is not interpretation, and the better method of overcoming erratic ideas is to trace them out dialectically and see if they will not recognize their own fatuity. The most irresponsible vision has certain principles of order and valuation by which it estimates itself; and in these principles the Life of Reason is already broached, however halting may be its development. We should lead ourselves out of our dream, as the Israelites were led out of Egypt, by the promise and eloquence of that dream itself. Otherwise we might kill the goose that lays the golden egg, and by proscribing imagination abolish science."
(George Santayana, Life of Reason (Sribner's, NY, 1954)pp11-12.)
Quote#6 on the complexity of concept formation in developing a general theory of religion:
"What chiefly characterizes creative thinking from more mundane forms are the willingness to accept vaguely defined problem statements and gradually structure them, a continuing preoccupation with problems over a considerable period of time, and an extensive background knowledge in relevant and potentially relevant areas."
Herbert Simon.
Quote#7 on the importance of thematic imagination in science.
Thematic imagination:.
"letting a fundamental presupposition (thema) act for a time as a guide in one's own research when there is not good proof for it"
"....sometimes (scientists) let their best work grow and mature out of an unlikely idea that they prevent from being destroyed at the hand of iron rationality. Of course, eventually, after this private and nascent phase is over, the results obtained with maturer technique and the guide of maturer theory must stand up to experimental check. Nature cannot be fooled. The graveyard of science is crowded with the victims of some obstinate belief in an idea that proved unworthy. But we must face the strange fact that there are genial spirits who can take the risk, and persevere for long periods without the comfort of confirmatory support, and survive to collect their prizes."
From Gerald Holton, 'Einstein, History, and Other Passions' (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1996)p96.
Quote#8 on effort:
"The scientific method is nothing more than doing your damnedest, no holds barred."
Percy Bridgeman