Science & Tech Quote by John B. S. Haldane

Haldane’s line doesn’t read like a plea for dialogue; it lands like a lab report with the polite parts removed. “No truce” is a militarized metaphor, and that’s the point: he’s framing science and religion not as rival hobbies, but as competing jurisdictions over what counts as truth. A truce implies two sides could agree to stop fighting without resolving anything. Haldane denies even that temporary détente, insisting the conflict isn’t about manners but methods.

The subtext is methodological, not merely ideological. Science advances by institutionalized doubt: claims are provisional, data can humiliate yesterday’s certainties, and authority is supposed to be defeasible. Religion, at least in its orthodox forms, asks for commitment to revelation, tradition, or sacred texts that aren’t meant to be revised by experiment. Haldane is arguing that when both try to explain the same world - origins, human nature, moral causality, miracles - they will collide because they answer to different courts of appeal.

Context matters: Haldane lived through the early 20th century, when Darwin’s implications were still being culturally litigated and when public education, secular governance, and scientific prestige were accelerating. He also wrote in an era where scientists increasingly saw themselves as modernity’s adult supervision, impatient with inherited metaphysics. The line carries that confidence, and maybe that overconfidence: it treats “religion” as a monolith, ignoring liberal theologies that retreat from literal cosmology. Still, the provocation works because it refuses the comforting fantasy that you can have science as a toolbox and religion as a constitution and never face jurisdictional disputes.