Scientists on Religion

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Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mathematician, Philosopher

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”

“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.”
 
G.K. Chesterton, Author

“Science can analyze a pork-chop, and say how much of it is phosphorous and how much is protein; but science cannot analyze any man’s wish for a pork-chop, and say how much of it is hunger, how much custom, how much nervous fancy… The man’s desire for the pork-chop remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his desire for heaven. All attempts, therefore, at a science of any human things, at a science of history, a science of folk-lore, a science of sociology, are by their nature not merely hopeless but crazy.”

“Only the modern, advanced, progressive scientific culture is unreasonably incomplete. It is, as [Robert Louis] Stevenson said, ‘a dingy ungentlemanly business; it leaves so much out of a man.’”
 
William A. Dembski, Mathematician

“Give us detailed, testable, mechanistic accounts for the origin of life, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of ubiquitous bio macromolecules and assemblages like the ribosome, and the origin of molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum, and intelligent design will die a quick and painless death.”

“The atheist is cheating whenever he makes a moral judgment, acting as though it has an objective reference, when his philosophy in fact precludes it.”
 
Alister E. McGrath, Theologian

“Atheism, I began to realize, rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis. The arguments that had once seemed bold, decisive, and conclusive increasingly turned out to be circular, tentative, and uncertain.”
 
Alvin Plantinga, Philosopher

“But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.”
 
M. Scott Peck, Psychiatrist

“… the public is actually eager to be guided by the pronouncement of scientists. As was discussed earlier in relation to the issue of group evil, the majority would rather follow than lead. We are content, even anxious, to let our authorities do our thinking for us. There is a profound tendency to make of our scientists “philosopher kings,” whom we allow to guide us through intellectual labyrinths, when they are often just as lost as the rest of us.”
 
Carl Jung, Psychiatrist

“I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time.”
 
Paul Davies, Physicist

“… there is no reason whatever to suppose that, left to itself, such a [primordial] soup would spontaneously generate life, even after millions of years, merely by exploring every combination of chemical arrangements. Simple statistics soon reveal that the probability of the spontaneous assembly of DNA - the complex molecule that carries the genetic code - as a result of random concatenations of the soup molecules is ludicrously - almost unthinkably - small. There are so many combinations of molecules possible that the chance of the right one cropping up by blind chance is virtually zero.”
 
M.Scott Peck, Psychiatrist

“Malignant narcissism is characterized by an unsubmitted will. All adults who are mentally healthy submit themselves one way or another to something higher than themselves, be it God or truth or love or some other ideal. They do what God wants them to do rather than what they would desire. “Thy will, not mine, be done,” the God-submitted person says. They believe in what is true rather than in what they would like to be true… Not so the evil, however. In the conflict between their guilt and their will, it is the guilt that must go and the will that must win.”
 
Nicola Tesla, Inventor

“So astounding are the facts in this connection, that it would seem as though the Creator himself had electrically designed this planet…"

“But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile."
 
Thomas Edison, Inventor

“I do not believe in the God of the theologians; but that there is a Supreme Intelligence I do not doubt.”
 
Paul Davies, Physicist

“The triumph of Darwinism … has given any sort of teleology, whether in biology, physics, or elsewhere, a very bad press. I would even go so far as to say that science is in the final throes of teleological cleansing. The antipathy stems partly from the theological overtones associated with teleology. Although Aristotle’s original concept of final causation was theologically neutral, teleology came to be seen by scientists as tantamount to the guiding hand of God at work in the physical universe. That was anathema, and the overthrow of teleology in evolution was greeted with enthusiasm by atheists. Friedrich Engels, for example, had this to say in a letter to Karl Marx in1859: ‘Darwin, by the way, whom I’m reading just now, as absolutely splendid. There was one aspect of teleology that had yet to be demolished, and that has now been done.’”
 
G.K. Chesterton, Author

“History and sociology can never be ‘scientific’ in the sense of subject to exact measurement. because there is always the mystery and doubt inherent in moral evidence affecting one half of the equation, and generally both.”

“Man’s primary purity and innocence may have dropped off with his tail, for all anybody knows; the only thing we know about that primary purity and innocence is that we have not got it. Nothing can be, in the strictest sense of the word, more comic than to set so shadowy a thing as the conjectures made by the vaguer anthropologists about primitive man against so solid a thing as the human sense of sin. By its nature the evidence of Eden is something that one cannot find. By its nature the evidence of sin is something that one cannot help finding.”
 
Plato, Philosopher

"Unless,’ said I, [Socrates], “either philosophers become kings in our states or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of’ philosophy seriously and adequately, and there is a conjunction of these two things, political power and philosophic intelligence, while the motley horde of the natures who at present pursue either apart from the other are compulsorily excluded, there can be no cessation of troubles, dear Glaucon, for our states, nor, I fancy for the human race either. Nor, until this happens, will this constitution which we have been expounding in theory ever be put into practice within the limits of possibility and see the light of the sun.”
 
Paul Davies, Physicist

“One may find it easier to believe in an infinite array of universes than in an infinite Deity, but such a belief must rest upon faith rather than observation.”
 
Fred Heeren, Science Journalist

“Notice the number of times we have described the precise requirement for things to be ‘held together’: the strong nuclear force has to be just right for nuclei to hold together, the weak interaction of burning hydrogen in every star must be precisely balanced with the gravitation that holds it together, centrifugal force must precisely balance gravitational force to hold solar systems and galaxies together, etc. With regard to all this holding together, both believers and unbelievers should find it interesting that Colossians 1:15 characterizes the Creator as one who ‘is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.’”
 
Fred Heeren, Science Journalist

“Human intelligence is inexplicable in Darwinian terms. This kind of advanced intelligence (over dogs, dolphins, and apes) appears to biologists as an extreme case of overkill. How do we explain our species’ ability to write great literature, compose symphonies, create fine art, carry out scientific experiments and do abstract, advanced mathematics? We don’t need these things to survive. Yet our ancestors had genes selected for these abilities for tens of thousands of years before they were called upon to use them, even for entertainment.”
 
Carl Sundell, Author

“To the best of my knowledge, no scientific evidence has been offered, nor can it be offered, that a Supreme Intelligence does not exist; nor that a Supreme Intelligence should not be suggested to explain the laws of nature operating as they do.”

**Isaac Newton **
“This most beautiful system [the solar system] could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”

Albert Einstein
“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.”

Thomas Edison
“I believe in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence pervading the Universe.”

Francis Collins, Leader of the international Human Genome Project, to reveal the DNA sequence.
“It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.”

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Robert Jastrow, Astronomer

“Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proven that the Universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks, What cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter and energy into the Universe? … And science cannot answer these questions, because, according to the astronomers, in the first moments of its existence the Universe was compressed to an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of fire beyond human imagination.”
 
Barry Parker, Physicist

“We do, of course, have an alternative. We could say that there was no creation, and that the universe has always been here. But this is even more difficult to accept than creation.”
 
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