If any... work gives a description of phenomena that appeals to... imagination rather than to... reason, then it is bad science. - Karl Pearson

[I]n the seventeenth century... the system-mongers were the theologians who declared that cosmical problems were not the legitimate problems of science. It was vain for Galilei to assert that the theologians' classification of facts was hopelessly inadequate. ...[T]hey settled that:—
"The doctrine that the earth is neither the centre of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both philosophically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith."
It took nearly two hundred years to convince the whole theological world that cosmical problems were the legitimate problems of science and science alone, for in 1819 the books of Galilei, Copernicus, and Keppler were still upon the index of forbidden books, and not till 1822 was a decree issued allowing books teaching the motion of the earth about the sun to be printed and published in Rome!

Chance... the origin of the word itself is very possibly related to the falling of the dice from their box,—and certainly the first attempts at a theory of Chance arose from the general interest in gambling with dice.

It is not theory, but actual statistical experience, which forces us to the conclusion that, however little we know of what will happen in the individual instance, yet the frequency of a large number of instances is distributed round the mode in a manner more and more smooth and uniform the greater the number of individual instances. When this distribution round the mode does not take place... then we assert that some cause other than chance is at work.