Walter Terence Stace - Modern Quotes

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Religion can probably out live any scientific discoveries which could be made. It can accommodate itself to them. The root cause of the decay of faith has not been any particular discovery of science, but rather the general spirit of science and certain basic assumptions upon which modern science, from the seventeenth century onwards, has proceeded.

Walter Terence Stace
The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when the scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called final causes. The final cause of a thing or event meant the purpose which it was supposed to serve in the universe, its cosmic purpose.

Walter Terence Stace
Religion can get on with any sort of astronomy, geology, biology, physics. But it cannot get on with a purposeless and meaningless universe. If the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends, money, fame, art, science, and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center. Hence the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless, spirit of modern man.

Walter Terence Stace
It is not that science proves that the world is not moral. Science as such is not concerned with values, and proves nothing of the sort. Nevertheless, as a matter of history, it is science which has suggested this view to the modern mind by its insistence on mechanistic categories.

Walter Terence Stace