Science Quote by Heinz R. Pagels

Pagels draws a bright line that our tech-obsessed culture keeps trying to smudge: science is an instrument for describing the world, not a moral authority for governing it. The sentence is almost aggressively plain, and that’s the point. In an era when “the science” is invoked like a closing argument, he reminds us that facts don’t arrive with instructions.

The intent is a warning against category error. Science can tell you carbon dioxide traps heat; it can’t tell you whether you should accept higher energy prices, restructure entire economies, or prioritize the needs of future generations over present voters. It can map the genome; it can’t resolve who gets access to therapies first, what counts as “enhancement,” or how much risk a society should tolerate. Pagels is pushing back on both sides of a familiar fight: the technocrat’s temptation to treat empirical findings as ethical mandates, and the skeptic’s convenient dodge that values are “just opinions” and therefore ignorable. If science doesn’t supply meaning, that doesn’t mean meaning isn’t required.

The subtext is democratic and slightly chastening. “What to do” belongs to politics, ethics, and culture - arenas that demand argument, trade-offs, and accountability. By refusing to let science launder moral decisions into neutral inevitabilities, Pagels insists we own our choices instead of outsourcing them to data.

Context matters: late-20th-century physics sat close to nuclear weapons, big computing, and institutional power. Pagels, writing and speaking publicly about science, knew how easily technical expertise can become a priesthood. His line works because it punctures that aura without diminishing science itself: it elevates it by assigning it the job it does best, then forces the rest of us back into the harder work of judgment.