Science & Tech Quote by John B. S. Haldane

Haldane slips a blade between two kinds of certainty: the devotional kind and the laboratory kind. As a working scientist with a knack for provocation, he refuses the comforting story that science is simply religion with better instruments. Instead he demotes both to something more human, more contingent: “art-forms.” That phrase is doing the real work. It doesn’t mean theories are fake; it means they’re made. They are crafted structures that organize experience, compress complexity, and let a person act in the world without being paralyzed by infinity.

The intent is practical, almost moral. “Regulates his conduct” frames religion and science as behavioral technologies, not pipelines to “ultimate fact.” Haldane is giving the “wise man” permission to use big explanatory systems without surrendering to them. The subtext is a warning against fundamentalism in either direction: the believer who mistakes metaphor for physics, and the scientistic zealot who turns models into commandments.

Context matters. Haldane lived through the early 20th century’s ideological bloodbaths and scientific revolutions: genetics, mechanized war, the rising prestige of “expert” authority. In that world, theories could quickly harden into political religion, or into a cold managerial worldview that pretends values are measurable. Calling theories “art-forms” is a tactical humility: a reminder that our best accounts of reality are still arrangements of language, math, and symbol. They succeed not because they are final, but because they’re usable, revisable, and psychologically livable.