Wade Rowland

“We think that the promotion of happiness is what science aims for, but as the man says, the reality of the world we live in is veiled by misleading ideas. You only have to read a newspaper to see that science has its own agenda. When it does serve humanity’s real interests, it does so more or less by accident. I mean, scientists and their apologists have this presumption of service built into all their rhetoric, but if you examine it, it’s meaningless. They tell us, ‘Science is performed for the welfare of the human species.’ But when you question a particular development—for example, some particularly gruesome ‘breakthrough’ in biotechnology—when you ask, ‘Can this really be good for us?’ they shut you up with ‘Of course it’s good for us. It has to be because it’s science, and what science does is good for us.”
― Wade Rowland, Galileo's Mistake: A New Look at the Epic Confrontation between Galileo and the Church

“First of all, as I have said, we—you and I, the family in that gondola—are constantly in the process of verifying our knowledge of the world by acting on it and in this way testing it. This is how we deepen belief in what we know. If society discourages us from acting on religious knowledge, it also limits the extent and depth of belief. So in a society such as ours that marginalizes religious experience and frowns on the too-public demonstration of religious belief, the growth and expansion of religious truth is stunted. Relative to science, then, religion will be less successful.”
― Wade Rowland, Galileo's Mistake: A New Look at the Epic Confrontation between Galileo and the Church