Rupert Sheldrake

“I still say the 'Lord's Prayer' every day. It covers a lot of ground in our relation to the world.”

“I'm talking about science on the leading edge, where it's not clear which way things are going be cause we don't know, and I'm dealing with areas which we don't know about.”

“The sciences are being held back by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas, maintained by powerful taboos. I believe that the sciences will be regenerated when they are set free.”

“I learnt about plants from my father, who was a herbalist and an amateur microscopist.”

“Right now, any opinion anyone has about whether dogs can or cannot really tell when their owner is coming home by some unknown means... nobody knows. The weight of evi dence suggests they can.”

“I do vote but I don't think that any political party represents my point of view.”

“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.”

“Most of nature is inherently chaotic. It's not rigidly determined in the old sense. It's not rigidly predictable.”

“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.”

“Physics is based on the assumption that certain fundamental features of nature are constant.”

“Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical.”

“Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system.”

“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.”

“To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world.”

“In both religion and science, some people are dishonest, exploitative, incompetent and exhibit other human failings.”

“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.”

“Now the whole point about machines is they are designed not to be random. When you call up a word processing program on your computer, you don't want it to be different every time you call it up. You want it to stay the same.”

“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.”

“The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think that's a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.”

“I think that the 'laws of nature' are also prone to evolve; I think they are more like habits than laws.”