scientists

• conceive of God as First Cause

5:5.3The fact-seek­ing sci­en­tist con­ceives of God as the First Cause, a God of force. The emo­tional artist sees God as the ideal of beauty, a God of aes­thet­ics. The rea­son­ing philoso­pher is some­times in­clined to posit a God of uni­ver­sal unity, even a pan­the­is­tic De­ity. The re­li­gion­ist of faith be­lieves in a God who fos­ters sur­vival, the Fa­ther in heaven, the God of love.

• no right to assert being materialists or idealists

132:1.2The stan­dard of true val­ues must be looked for in the spir­i­tual world and on di­vine lev­els of eter­nal re­al­ity. To an as­cend­ing mor­tal all lower and ma­te­rial stan­dards must be rec­og­nized as tran­sient, par­tial, and in­fe­rior. The sci­en­tist, as such, is lim­ited to the dis­cov­ery of the re­lat­ed­ness of ma­te­rial facts. Tech­ni­cally, he has no right to as­sert that he is ei­ther ma­te­ri­al­ist or ide­al­ist, for in so do­ing he has as­sumed to for­sake the at­ti­tude of a true sci­en­tist since any and all such as­ser­tions of at­ti­tude are the very essence of phi­los­o­phy.

• on trial before bar of human need

132:1.4The ma­te­ri­al­is­tic sci­en­tist and the ex­treme ide­al­ist are des­tined al­ways to be at log­ger­heads. This is not true of those sci­en­tists and ide­al­ists who are in pos­ses­sion of a com­mon stan­dard of high moral val­ues and spir­i­tual test lev­els. In ev­ery age sci­en­tists and re­li­gion­ists must rec­og­nize that they are on trial be­fore the bar of hu­man need. They must es­chew all war­fare be­tween them­selves while they strive valiantly to jus­tify their con­tin­ued sur­vival by en­hanced de­vo­tion to the ser­vice of hu­man prog­ress. If the so-called sci­ence or re­li­gion of any age is false, then must it ei­ther pu­rify its ac­tiv­i­ties or pass away be­fore the emer­gence of a ma­te­rial sci­ence or spir­i­tual re­li­gion of a truer and more wor­thy or­der.

• danger of mathematical pride, statistical egotism

133:5.4Sci­en­tists may some day mea­sure the en­ergy, or force man­i­fes­ta­tions, of grav­i­ta­tion, light, and elec­tric­ity, but these same sci­en­tists can never (sci­en­tif­i­cally) tell you what these uni­verse phe­nom­ena are. Sci­ence deals with phys­i­cal-en­ergy ac­tiv­i­ties; re­li­gion deals with eter­nal val­ues. True phi­los­o­phy grows out of the wis­dom which does its best to cor­re­late these quan­ti­ta­tive and qual­i­ta­tive ob­ser­va­tions. There al­ways ex­ists the dan­ger that the purely phys­i­cal sci­en­tist may be­come af­flicted with math­e­mat­i­cal pride and sta­tis­ti­cal ego­tism, not to men­tion spir­i­tual blind­ness.