Scientists on Religion

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Fred Hoyle Astronomer, Mathematician

“Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics, on which life depends, are in every respect deliberate… It is, therefore, almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect higher intelligence -even to the limit of God.”
 
Blaise Pascal Mathematician, Inventor, Theologian

“Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.”
 
**Karl Popper **Philosopher of Science

“I am on the side of science, but I am against those exaggerated claims for science that have sometimes been, rightly, described as ‘scientism.’ I am on the side of the search for truth, and on intellectual daring in the search for truth; but I am against intellectual arrogance, and especially against the misconceived claim that we have the truth in our pockets, or that we can approach certainty. It is important to realize that science does not make assertions about ultimate questions – about the riddles of existence, or about man’s task in this world. This has often been well understood. But some great scientists and many lesser ones, have misunderstood the situation. The fact that science cannot make any pronouncement about ethical principles has been misinterpreted as indicating that there are no such principles; while in fact the search for truth presupposes ethics.”
 
Roger Penrose Mathematical Physicist

“There is a certain sense in which I would say the universe has a purpose. It’s not there just somehow by chance. Some people take the view that the universe is simply there and it runs along-it’s a bit as though it just sort of computes, and we happen by accident to find ourselves in this thing. I don’t think that’s a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe, I think that there is something much deeper about it, about its existence, which we have very little inkling of at the moment.”
 
**Isaac Newton **Physicist

“We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy.”
 
Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomer

“To know the mighty works of God, to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful workings of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance cannot be more grateful than knowledge.”
 
Werner Heisenberg Physicist

“The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.”
 
Albert Einstein Theoretical Physicist

“I see a pattern, but my imagination cannot picture the maker of that pattern. I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one?”
 
Mariano Artigas Physicist, Philosopher

“Scientism is self-defeating because it makes us prisoners of one of our most impressive achievements: empirical science.”
 
**Stanley Jaki **Physicist

“Unlike an angel, who needs no conquests, and unlike an ape uninterested in them, man thrives on conquests which are the fruit of a mysterious union in him of matter and mind.”
 
Antony Flew Analytic Philosopher

“It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”
 
**Tony Rothman **Theoretical Physicist

“When confronted with the order and beauty of the universe and the strange coincidences of nature, it’s very tempting to take the leap of faith from science into religion. I am sure many physicists want to. I only wish they would admit it.”

James Jeans Physicist

“We discover that the universe shows evidence of a designing or controlling power that has something in common with our own individual minds.”
 
**Erwin Chargaff **Biologist

“It is the sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist; the same blind force, blindly seeing, deafly hearing, unconsciously remembering, that drives the larva into the butterfly. If [the scientist] has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, this confrontation with an immense invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist.”
 
Allan Sandage Astronomer

“It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science. It is only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence.”
 
**Edgar Mitchell **U.S. Astronaut

“Instead of an intellectual search, there was suddenly a very deep gut feeling that something was different… seeing that Sun… set in the background of the very deep black and velvety cosmos, seeing–rather, knowing for sure–that there was a purposefulness of flow, of energy, of time, of space in the cosmos–that it was beyond man’s rational ability to understand, that suddenly there was a nonrational way of understanding that had been beyond my previous experience… On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious.”
 
Max Planck Physicist

“Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part by itself, since such a method often implies the loss of important properties of the system. We must keep out attention fixed on the whole and on the inter-connection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts.”
 
Alfred North Whitehead Mathematician, Philosopher

“Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.”
 
George Greenstein Astronomer

“As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency–or rather, Agency–must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?”
 
Joseph Silk Astronomer

“The fact that our own universe is unexpectedly hospitable to life is certainly not an inevitable evolutionary effect. The fact that the laws of nature barely, but only barely, allow stable stars to exist with planetary systems today is not a circumstance subject to evolutionary variation. The world either possesses such invariant properties or it does not. A number of independent properties of the universe are so advantageous to the evolution of life that it almost appears designed with our emergence predestined. Could these remarkable ‘coincidences’ be the camouflage of a Grand Designer?”
 
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