Quotes about Empirical

Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable.

Don't be more serious than God. God invented dog farts. God designed your body's plumbing system. God designed an ostrich. If He didn't do it, He permitted a drunken angel to do it. Empirical facts can add significantly to the meaning of "being godlike".

The truth is of more value than empirical life: Christ sacrificed his life for it.

Empirical life is rooted in an a priori datum which does not come slowly into existence by mechanical development, but is a gift of God's grace, and a fruit and result of his revelation.

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

All three of Kepler's laws of planetary motion can be derived from Newtonian principles. Kepler's laws were empirical, based upon the painstaking observations of Tycho Brahe. Newton's laws were theoretical, rather simple mathematical abstractions from which all of Tycho's measurements could ultimately be derived. From these laws, Newton wrote with undisguised pride in the Principia, "I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World.

The physical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts there is no higher knowledge than the empirical knowledge of scientific phenomena. The mathematical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts that some higher knowledge is needed to explain scientific facts, and that higher knowledge is mathematics.

Because the Church is mystery, there can be no question of deductive or crudely empirical tests. Deduction is ruled out because we have no clear abstract concepts of the Church that could furnish terms for a syllogism. Empirical tests are inadequate because visible results and statistics will never by themselves tell us whether a given decision was right or wrong.

First of all, a sermon can never grasp the center, but can only itself be grasped by it, by Christ. And then Christ becomes flesh as much in the word of the pietists as in that of the clerics or of the religious socialists, and these empirical connections actually pose difficulties for preaching that are absolute, not merely relative.

Visit a typical science classroom and you will discover far more than empirical facts being taught. The dominant worldview among scientific intellectuals is evolutionary naturalism, which holds that humans are essentially biochemical machines.

The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.

Science is merely an extremely powerful method of winnowing what's true from what feels good.