Scientists on Religion

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John F. Kennedy, Statesman

“The science of weapons and war has made us all one world and one human race with one common destiny.”
 
S.T. Coleridge, Poet

“My Opinion is this—that deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation. The more I understand of Sir Isaac Newton’s works, the more boldly I dare utter to my own mind … that I believe the Souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton.”
 
William Shakespeare, Dramatist, Poet

“This is the excellent foppery of the world: that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeits of our own behaviour—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!”
 
Hannes Alfven, Physicist Nobel Prize

“I was there when Abbe Georges Lemaître first proposed this [Big Bang] theory. … There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. … It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.
[Expressing his belief that the Big Bang is a myth devised to explain creation. He said he heard Lemaître (who was, at the time both a member of the Catholic hierarchy and an accomplished scientist) say in private that this theory was a way to reconcile science with St. Thomas Aquinas’ theological dictum of creatio ex nihilo—creation out of nothing.]”

Quoted in Anthony L. Peratt, ‘Dean of the Plasma Dissidents’, Washington Times, supplement: The World and I (May 1988),196.
 
James Hutton, Geologist

“Nature, everywhere the most amazingly and outstandingly remarkable producer of living bodies, being most carefully arranged according to physical, mechanical, and chemical laws, does not give even the smallest hint of its extraordinary and tireless workings and quite clearly points to its work as being alone worthy of a benign and omnipotent God; and it carries this bright quality in all of its traces, in that, just as all of its general mechanisms rejoice, so also do all of their various smallest component parts rejoice in the depth of wisdom, in the height of perfection, and in the lofty arrangement of forms and qualities, which lie far beyond every investigation of the human mind.”
 
James Russell Lowell, Poet

“Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the Future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.”
 
Louis Agassiz, Geologist

“I sometimes hear preachers speak of the sad condition of men who live without God in the world, but a scientist who lives without God in the world seems to me worse off than ordinary men.”

“I will frankly tell you that my experience in prolonged scientific investigations convinces me that a belief in God—a God who is behind and within the chaos of vanishing points of human knowledge—adds a wonderful stimulus to the man who attempts to penetrate into the regions of the unknown.”
 
Étienne Gilson, Philosopher

“The philosopher does not seek to understand the world — that is the business of the scientist — but he asks himself how is it that there is a world to understand? How is it that this world is intelligible to human beings and that there is an intelligent being to know it in its intelligibility?”
 
Will Durant, Historian, Philosopher

“Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.”
 
Emily Dickinson, Poet

“Faith” is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see—
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.
 
Immanuel Kant, Philosopher

“God put a secret art into the forces of Nature so as to enable it to fashion itself out of chaos into a perfect world system.”
 
Samuel Johnson, Lexicographer, Critic

“You may translate books of science exactly. … The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written.”
 
John Locke, Philosopher

“To show, therefore, that we are capable of knowing, i.e. being certain that there is a God, and how we may come by this certainty, I think we need go no further than ourselves, and that undoubted knowledge we have of our own existence… For man knows that he himself exists… If any one pretends to be so sceptical as to deny his own existence, (for really to doubt of it is manifestly impossible,) let him for me enjoy his beloved happiness of being nothing, until hunger or some other pain convince him of the contrary… He knows also that nothing cannot produce a being; therefore something must have existed from eternity… Next, it is evident, that what had its being and beginning from another, must also have all that which is in and belongs to its being from another too. All the powers it has must be owing to and received from the same source. This eternal source, then, of all being must also be the source and original of all power; and so this eternal Being must be also the most powerful… And most knowing. Again, a man finds in himself perception and knowledge. We have then got one step further; and we are certain now that there is not only some being, but some knowing, intelligent being in the world. There was a time, then, when there was no knowing being, and when knowledge began to be; or else there has been also a knowing being from eternity…And therefore God.”
 
Thomas Carlyle, Historian

“This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.”
 
John Ruskin, Author

“The truth of Nature is a part of the truth of God; to him who does not search it out, darkness; to him who does, infinity.”
 
Winston Churchill, Statesman

(On the discovery of nuclear energy.)

“The Dark Ages may return—the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of Science; and what might now shower immeasurable material blessings upon mankind may even bring about its total destruction. Beware! I say. Time may be short.”
 
Albert Einstein, Physicist

“Do we want science at any price?”
 
Fulton Sheen, Clergyman

“The sciences need philosophy; philosophy, in turn, needs the sciences. On both sides, certain naive minds, too confident in their own forces and satisfied with ideas entirely too superficial, believed in the universal value of a single method. On both side a severe critique must lead each method back to its just limits, and teach them to ask aid of the other methods and manners of approach which, by their convergence, will permit the mind to embrace the diverse aspects of reality”.

“The physical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts there is no higher knowledge than the empirical knowledge of scientific phenomena. The mathematical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts that some higher knowledge is needed to explain scientific facts, and that higher knowledge is mathematics.”
 
Ambrose Bierce, Humorist

LOGIC, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion—thus:
Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.
Minor Premise: One man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds; therefore—
Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second.
This may be called the syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed.
 
Richard David Feinman, Biochemist

“How can you say one thing when your data shows something else? One doesn’t know what was on the authors’ minds and maybe they interpreted things differently but the sense is that the literature maintains an attitude somewhat like the approach of lawyers. If the jury buys it, it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s true. In scientific publishing, the jury are the reviewers and the editors. If they are already convinced of the conclusion, if there is no voir dire, you will surely win the case.”
 
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