No religious position is loyally served by refusing to consider annoying theories which may well turn out to be facts.
Theories
Goals and objectives are based on theories and foundations.
Putin and his advisers don’t understand the power of public opinion in the West. They believe in conspiracy theories and that someone is orchestrating a malicious campaign against Russia. They don’t realize that even conservative politicians have to react when newspapers and artists express their concern on such an issue.
Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.
I want to do a certain thing in the world, and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.
I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there’s a continuity between philosophy and science in that way.
Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one.
Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.
It is impossible to advance new theories… when you are under the influence of a particular view, or under the pressure of a particular dogma.
We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the down trodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men.