Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Rupert Sheldrake
Age: 54
Author
Biochemist
Biologist
Parapsychologist
Philosopher
Writer
Newark
Nottinghamshire
Alfred Rupert Sheldrake
Like
Belief
Early
Evolving
Law
Habit
Evolved
Actually
Eternal
Informed
Christian
Along
Habits
Science
Perhaps
Assumption
Nature
Century
Evolve
Postulates
Stills
System
Harmony
Vestige
Still
Modern
Laws
Seventeenth

More quotes by Rupert Sheldrake

Image
Because a truly skeptical position would be a very uncertain one.
Rupert Sheldrake
Image
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
Image
The universe is not in a steady state there's an ongoing creative principle in nature, which is driving things onwards.
Rupert Sheldrake
Image
I still say the Lord's Prayer every day. It covers a lot of ground in our relation to the world.
Rupert Sheldrake
Image
The fact that you can forge a twenty dollar bill doesn't prove that all twenty dollar bills are forgeries.
Rupert Sheldrake
Image
I think that the 'laws of nature' are also prone to evolve I think they are more like habits than laws.
Rupert Sheldrake
Image
The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith.
Rupert Sheldrake
Image
There's a certain kind of scepticism that can't bear uncertainty.
Rupert Sheldrake
Image
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
Image
At the moment of insight, a potential pattern of organized behavior comes into being.
Rupert Sheldrake
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system.
Rupert Sheldrake
Image
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
Image
Creativity gives new forms, new patterns, new ideas, new art forms. And we don't know where creativity comes from. Is it inspired from above? Welling up from below? Picked up from the air? What? Creativity is a mystery wherever you encounter it.
Rupert Sheldrake
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical.
Rupert Sheldrake