Faith & Spirit Quote by Warren Weaver

Weaver draws a clean border where most modern life feels like a blur: science as description, religion as judgment. Coming from a mid-century scientist steeped in systems thinking and wartime research culture, the move isn’t anti-religious so much as defensive. It protects science from being drafted into morality plays. After the 20th century proved that technical brilliance can coexist with ethical catastrophe, insisting that science has “no concern” with good and bad reads like a refusal to let facts be blamed for the uses we put them to.

The line works because it’s both modest and provocative. Modest in tone: science “attempts” to analyze, a verb that undercuts any swagger about certainty. Provocative in its implied rebuke: if you want purpose, don’t pretend the lab will deliver it. That’s a shot at the cultural habit of treating scientific authority as a substitute priesthood, expected to certify not just what is true but what is worth doing.

Still, Weaver’s partition is also a strategic simplification. By framing religion as “precisely” the quest for moral meaning, he leaves out how religions also make empirical claims, and how science constantly brushes against values: what we choose to study, who gets protected, which risks are acceptable. The subtext is a plea for intellectual hygiene. Keep your categories straight, he suggests, or you’ll end up smuggling ethics in through the back door and calling it “objective.”