Read the following passage carefully and then decide whether the statements which follow are true(T)or false(F). Most serious scientists spend a good part of their waking hours amid papers and preprints, equations and equipment, conducting experiments, talking about graphs and data, arguing about ideas and theories, teaching, and writing grant proposals. But if they browse in bookstores or glance in the book review sections of journals, they cannot fail to find a fascinating phenomenon in the scientific landscape; books proclaiming the extrarational implications of science are proliferating. Religion and mysticism are inching their way back into the arena of science whence(some thought)they had been gradually weeded out during the past two centuries. Right from the days of Kepler and Galileo, scientists have generally had a religious side to them: After all, except when they encounter faiths of a different shade, religions normally have only civilizing effects on the human heart. Isaac Newton believed in a personal God, explicitly calling himself His servant. Leonard Euler was deeply religious, and so were Augustin Cauchy and Michael Faraday. One author has written a 100-page volume filled with quotations from eminent scientists expressing their religious convictions. No reflecting scientist can be immune to the awe and majesty of the physical world, nor insensitive to the deep mystery underlying life and consciousness, though some troy not express it in traditional ways. But the scientific worldview arrived at by collective and extensive inquiries, fortified by countless instruments and carefully-erected conceptual tools, has been in awkward contradiction to explanations of how the world began and behaves, or how life emerged, as reported in the holy books of human history. As a result, ever since the Copernican revolution, there have been confrontations between scientific theories and religious worldviews. In 1896, A. D. White published his erudite work, which was an embarrassingly candid exposure, instance after instance, of the dogged obstinacy of the religious establishment in upholding ancient doctrines in the face of mounting scientific evidence to the contrary. After a full century, however, the situation seems to have changed drastically. A plethora of extrapolations of science are cropping up whose goal is to reestablish prescience. Many popular books, TV specials, magazine articles, and conference papers are joyously declaring that the ancients were not as much in the dark as Bacon and company had imagined; that, if anything, they had, through intuition and revelation, pretty much summed up the essence of twentieth-century physics and cosmology: from the strange physics of vacuums to the big bang. In the view of quite a few writers(including some practicing scientists of repute), physics has shown that Hindu mystics were right in picturing the cosmos as the Dancing Divine; that Chinese philosophers were on target when they spoke of yin and yang, for these referred implicitly to the conservation of matter and energy; and that the Book of Genesis formulates the principle of evolution in metaphorical meters. It has been claimed that receding galaxies provide experimental confirmation of what cabalists had already recognized in medieval times, and inklings of the esoteric formulations of quantum physics(the so-called S-matrix theory)have been detected in Buddhist sutras. Whether or not mainstream professional scientists take note of it, whether or not they attach weight to such claims, a significant fact in the closing decade of our century is that mysticism and old-time religion are back in full vigor in public consciousness, not just as enriching dimensions of the human spirit, nor even as competing modes of knowing or perceiving, but as profound intuitive visions that have at long last been "scientifically proven". A good deal of academic discussion is dedicated either to showing how limited and misleading the intellect is or to proving that nonrationally-derived insights have been confirmed by the most recent scientific theories. According to A. D. White, religious authorities simply turned a deaf ear to the growing amount of scientific evidence contrary to their worldviews.

A. TRUE
B. FALSE