Faith & Spirit Quote by Clyde Tombaugh

A scientist who literally expanded the map of the solar system isn’t trying to pick a fight with faith for sport; he’s drawing a jurisdictional line. Tombaugh’s phrasing is careful in a way that signals intent: “Unfortunately” isn’t a sneer, it’s a sigh. He’s acknowledging the cultural cost of saying predominately religious narratives don’t square with empirical reality. That single adverb softens the blow while still insisting the blow is necessary.

The engine of the quote is the contrast between “ancient mythology” and “the findings of science.” Mythology here isn’t just “a story people used to believe.” It’s a label that demotes certain biblical concepts from factual claims to symbolic inheritance, placing them alongside cosmologies that once organized life but can’t survive modern verification. Tombaugh doesn’t attack moral teaching or spiritual practice; he targets “concepts” that function as explanations of the natural world: origins, miracles, cosmic architecture. The subtext is blunt: if these claims compete with testable models, they lose.

Context matters. Tombaugh came of age during a century when astronomy and physics repeatedly rewrote humanity’s self-image, from galaxies beyond the Milky Way to a universe with deep time. After discoveries like his, scripture-as-cosmology looks less like authority and more like artifact. The quote works because it refuses melodrama; it presents incompatibility as an update problem. The sting is in “doesn’t fit”: not evil, not foolish, just outdated. That’s often the hardest verdict for a sacred story to absorb.