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For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.

Rupert Sheldrake

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Rupert Sheldrake
Age: 54
Author
Biochemist
Biologist
Parapsychologist
Philosopher
Writer
Newark
Nottinghamshire
Alfred Rupert Sheldrake
Term
Beliefs
Belief
Physics
Materialists
Faith
Explain
Sustained
Science
Eventually
Discoveries
Everything
Believer
Believers
Years
Scientific
Promised
Discovery
Chemistry
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Justify

More quotes by Rupert Sheldrake

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Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical.
Rupert Sheldrake
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The assumption that the laws of nature are eternal is a vestige of the Christian belief system that informed the early postulates of modern science in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the laws of nature have actually evolved along with nature itself, and perhaps they are still evolving. Or perhaps they are not laws at all, but more like habits.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.
Rupert Sheldrake
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The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels.
Rupert Sheldrake
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The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in.
Rupert Sheldrake
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At the moment of insight, a potential pattern of organized behavior comes into being.
Rupert Sheldrake
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I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to arise up within it.
Rupert Sheldrake
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The fact that you can forge a twenty dollar bill doesn't prove that all twenty dollar bills are forgeries.
Rupert Sheldrake
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When people see one of these new forms of art for the first time, often they can't make sense of it. Then, if it's around long enough, a lot of people get used to it and it becomes assimilated into culture. So there's a morphic field both for the kind of art and for the appreciation of it.
Rupert Sheldrake
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There's a certain kind of scepticism that can't bear uncertainty.
Rupert Sheldrake
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I have been a scientist for more than 40 years, having studied at Cambridge and Harvard. I researched and taught at Cambridge University, was a research fellow of the Royal Society, and have more than 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals. I am strongly pro-science.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Because a truly skeptical position would be a very uncertain one.
Rupert Sheldrake
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The cumulative nature of the evolutionary process, the fact that memory is preserved, means that life grows not just through a random proliferation of new forms, but there's a kind of cumulative quality.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Matter is merely mind deadened by the development of habit to the point where the breaking up of these habits is very difficult.
Rupert Sheldrake
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In both religion and science, some people are dishonest, exploitative, incompetent and exhibit other human failings.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Not every good idea survives. Not every new form of art is repeated. Not every new potential instinct is successful. Only the successful ones get repeated. By natural selection and then through repetition they become probable, more habitual.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they've been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual.
Rupert Sheldrake
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Of the seven experiments, the ones that have been most investigated so far have been the pets. The dogs who know when their masters for coming home, and the sense of being stared at.
Rupert Sheldrake
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A lot of us have all sorts of ideas, and we select some rather than others and give expression to those... and some works of art are more successful than others. Some languish in obscurity and are never heard of again, while others form the foundation of a whole school of art.
Rupert Sheldrake