Science Quote by Asa Gray

Gray’s opening move is a polite feint that doubles as a warning shot: he assumes his audience is tired of recycled doctrine. “I take it for granted” is doing strategic work, casting skepticism toward clerical repetition as the default posture of reasonable people. He isn’t merely declining to preach; he’s quietly asserting that preaching is the problem - an “echo,” not an argument.

The line lands in the thick of 19th-century America’s Darwin-era anxiety, when scientific authority and religious authority were competing to set the terms of public truth. Gray, a leading botanist and one of Darwin’s most important American defenders, had to thread a needle: speak forcefully about evolution without sounding like either a crusading atheist or a captive of orthodoxy. So he sets ground rules. The pulpit and the “theological class-room” represent two modes of certainty: one emotional and moral, the other scholastic and institutional. By rejecting both, he positions science as neither mere opinion nor inherited tradition, but a discipline of evidence and revision.

There’s also a subtle bid for trust. Gray reassures listeners he won’t condescend or proselytize; he will treat them as adults who can handle novelty without a chaperone. The subtext: if you want comfort, go to church; if you want reality, stay here. It’s a scientist claiming cultural jurisdiction - not by attacking religion outright, but by refusing to let it set the echoing boundaries of the conversation.