Scientists on Religion

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Carl Sundell, Author

“The usual objection to intelligent design from within the scientific community is that it suggests God as the Intelligent Designer. This is forbidden. However, intelligent design introduces no such thing unless anyone is intent on identifying the source of the designer as a deity. What intelligent design does, for example, is ask how complex organisms could arise by chance from inanimate matter. There is no theory that explains or proves such a likelihood, and all the evidence goes against chance rather than in its favor. If the theory of intelligent design stops at that point, it is entirely scientific, since we can detect by observation and deduction when things are designed and when they happen by chance. Intelligent design could be explained as well by an advanced alien creature seeding the earth with life as it can be explained by a deity doing as much. Indeed, this was the first supposition of Francis Crick when he discovered DNA and decided that, based on its complexity, it could not have arose from inanimate matter without being designed.”
 
Kitty Ferguson, Science Writer

“Even lacking experiential evidence for the presence of God, I might notice that belief in God makes me stronger, better, kinder, more loving, happier, wiser, more discerning, better able to cope with life. I couldn’t make a scientific experiment out of it by setting up a clone of myself to see how much weaker, worse, less kind, less loving, sadder, more foolish, less discerning, less able to cope with life, that clone would be without belief in God. I couldn’t prove that wasn’t merely false belief and encouragement that was doing the trick (a sort of placebo effect), not the fact that the belief was correct. I also wouldn’t be able to say how much any of the positive attributes might have contributed to and caused my faith rather than resulted from it. However, I might not allow those quibbles to stop my concluding that belief in God has led to good results for me and therefore must have some validity.”
 
Jacques Maritain, Philosopher

“Since science’s competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.”
 
Karl Popper, Philosopher

“Evolution is not a fact. Evolution doesn’t even qualify as a theory or as a hypothesis. It is a metaphysical research program, and it is not really testable science.”
 
Kitty Ferguson, Science Writer

“There is no formula that can deliver all truth, all harmony, all simplicity. No Theory of Everything can ever provide total insight. For, to see through everything would leave us seeing nothing at all. But St. Paul wrote: ‘Now we see a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.’ Religion is far more optimistic than human reason, we can know ‘everything important.’ Perhaps the most significant difference between science and religion is that science thinks that on this quest we are entirely on our own. Religion tells us that although we who seek the truth may ride imaginary horses, Truth also seeks us.”
 
John Moffat, Physicist

“Physics is imagination in a straight jacket.”
 
William Paley, Naturalist

“… the watch had a watchmaker; that there must have existed, at sometime, and at some place or another, an artificers or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use , every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.”
 
C.S. Lewis, Author

“What one must not do is rule out the supernatural as the one impossible explanation.”
 
Henry Parry Liddon, Theologian

“So long as men die, life will reassert its tragic interest from time to time with fresh energy, and to this interest Christianity alone can respond. If the scientific people could rid us of death, they might indeed hope to win over the heart and conscience of the world, permanently, to some form of non-theistic speculation. As it is, the tide ebbs, as I believe, only that it may flow again.”
 
Isaac Newton, Physicist

“It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God: a true, supreme, or imaginary dominion makes a true, supreme, or imaginary God. And from this true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being; and from his other perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect.”
 
Joseph Fort Newton, Theologian

“Only God is permanently interesting. Other things we may fathom, but he out-tops our thought and can neither be demonstrated nor argued down.”
 
Plato, Philosopher

“Of our troubles we must seek some other cause than God.”
 
Austin Dobson, Poet

Time goes, you say? Ah no!
Alas, Time stays, we go.
 
Francis Bacon, Philosopher of Science

“Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity, and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.”
 
William Francis Gray Swann, Physicist

“When I view the universe as a whole, I admit that it is a marvelous structure; and what is more, I insist that it is of what I may call an intelligent design … There is really very little difference between my own thoughts about the matter and the thoughts of a fundamentalist.”
 
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet

One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.
 
Walt Whitman, Poet

The world, the race, the soul - in space and
time, the universes,
All bound as is befitting each - all surely
going somewhere
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Philosopher

“Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere.”
 
Edward Herbert, Philosopher

“Whoever considers the study of anatomy, I believe will never be an atheist; the frame of man’s body, and coherence of his parts, being so strange and paradoxical, that I hold it to be the greatest miracle of nature.”
 
Thomas Carlyle, Philosopher

“He is of the earth, but his thoughts are with the stars. Mean and petty his wants and desires; yet they serve a soul exalted with grand, glorious aims - with immortal longings - with thoughts which sweep the heavens, and wander through eternity. A pigmy standing on the outward crest of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest.”
 
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