Science & Tech Quote by Martin Luther King Jr.

King is doing a careful piece of boundary-drawing that doubles as coalition politics. By pairing “science investigates” with “religion interprets,” he refuses the culture-war script that treats faith and empiricism as rival teams. Science, in his framing, is a method: it asks how the world works. Religion is a moral vocabulary: it argues what the world means and what we owe each other inside it. The genius is the parallel structure, which makes the division feel orderly rather than defensive.

The pivot comes in the second sentence, where “knowledge” becomes “power” and “wisdom” becomes “control.” He’s not praising domination; he’s warning about it. Power here is capacity without conscience: the ability to do things, build things, destroy things. “Control” is self-governance, restraint, an ethic strong enough to keep capability from sliding into cruelty. In mid-century America, with nuclear weapons, technological acceleration, and bureaucratic systems that could sort and punish at scale, that distinction wasn’t abstract. It was the moral crisis of modernity.

There’s subtext aimed at multiple audiences at once: religious listeners tempted to distrust science are told to stop fearing inquiry; secular listeners tempted to dismiss religion are told that moral imagination isn’t optional. As a minister who insisted the civil rights struggle was both practical and spiritual, King positions religion not as anti-intellectual superstition but as a disciplining force - the thing that can keep a powerful society from mistaking what it can do for what it should do.