Scientists on Religion

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Arno Penzias, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“I do not believe that anyone should ever say that science agrees with religion. What I would say, which I think is a far more powerful statement, and one which allows people to be religious, is to say, the modern observations of science do not disagree with religion.”

“Astronomy leads us to an unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly-improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan.”
 
Max Planck, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“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.”

Johann Kepler, Astronomer

“Now, as God the maker played, He taught the game to Nature, Whom He created in His Image.”
 
Gerald Schroeder, Physicist

“The further philosophical problem of there having been a beginning arises with the idea that the beginning of our universe marks the beginning of time, space, and matter. Before our universe came into being, there is every scientific indication that time did not exist. Whatever brought the universe into existence must of course predate the universe, which in turn means that whatever brought the universe into existence must predate time. That which predates time is not bound by time. Not inside of time. In other words, it is eternal. If the laws of physics, or at least some aspect of the laws of physics, did the job of creation, those laws by necessity are eternal.”
 
Ambrose Bierce, Humorist

CARTESIAN, adj. Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito, ergo sum—whereby he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito ergo cogito sum—‘I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;’ as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

DENTIST, n. A prestidigitator who, putting metal into your mouth, pulls coins out of your pocket
 
J.B.S. Haldane, Geneticist

“If the minimal organism involves not only the code for its one or more proteins, but also twenty types of soluble RNA, one for each amino acid, and the equivalent of ribosomal RNA, our descendants may be able to make one, but we must give up the idea that such an organism could have been produced in the past, except by a similar pre-existing organism or by an agent, natural or supernatural, at least as intelligent as ourselves, and with a good deal more knowledge.”
 
Henry Adams, Historian

“If thought is capable of being classified with electricity, or will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessary to fall at once under the second law of thermodynamics. Of all possible theories, this is likely to prove the most fatal to professors of history.”]

Annie Dillard, Author

“The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which everything, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die. The world came into being with the signing of this contract. A scientist calls it the second law of thermodynamics.”
 
William Lane Craig, Philosopher

“Catching the apple doesn’t overturn the law of gravity or the formulation of a new law. It’s merely an intervention of a person with freewill who overrides the natural causes operative in that particular circumstance. And that, essentially, is what God does when he causes a miracle to occur.”
 
William D. Phillips, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“…Why do I believe in God? As a physicist, I look at nature from a particular perspective. I see an orderly, beautiful universe in which nearly all physical phenomena can be understood from a few simple mathematical equations. I see a universe that, had it been constructed slightly differently, would never have given birth to stars and planets, let alone bacteria and people. And there is no good scientific reason for why the universe should not have been different.”

“Many good scientists have concluded from these observations that an intelligent God must have chosen to create the universe with such beautiful, simple, and life-giving properties. Many other equally good scientists are nevertheless atheists. Both conclusions are positions of faith…I find these arguments suggestive and supportive of belief in God, but not conclusive. I believe in God because I can feel God’s presence in my life, because I can see the evidence of God’s goodness in the world, because I believe in Love and because I believe that God is Love.”
 
John O’Keefe, Astronomer

“We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures….If the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in.”
 
John Hedley Brooke, Science Historian

“The principal aim of this book has been to reveal something of the complexity of the relationship between science and religion as they have interacted in the past. Popular generalizations about that relationship, whether couched in terms of war or peace, simply do not stand up to serious investigation. There is no such thing as the relationship between science and religion.”

“The possibilities of Evolution as an alternative religion were similarly perceived by a later popularizer, Wilhelm Bölsche, who spoke of the scientific movement as having effected a “Second Reformation.” There had been an Old and a New Testament; now there was a third, the testament of science, which transcended both.”
 
Enrico Fermi, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.”

Carl Sundell, Author

“Knowledge of the difference between good and evil rightly does go forward. Ignorance of that knowledge does not make of man a mere animal so much as a raging monster.”
 
G.K. Chesterton, Author

“The Universe repeats itself, with the possible exception of history.” Of all earthly studies history is the only one that does not repeat itself. … Astronomy repeats itself; botany repeats itself; trigonometry repeats itself; mechanics repeats itself; compound long division repeats itself. Every sum if worked out in the same way at any time will bring out the same answer. … A great many moderns say that history is a science; if so it occupies a solitary and splendid elevation among the sciences; it is the only science the conclusions of which are always wrong."
 
Henri Poincare, Mathematician

“Astronomy is useful because it raises us above ourselves; it is useful because it is grand; it is useful because it is beautiful… It shows us how small is man’s body, how great his mind, since his intelligence can embrace the whole of this dazzling immensity, where his body is only an obscure point, and enjoy its silent harmony.”
 
James Burke, Science Historian

"Somebody once observed to the eminent philosopher Wittgenstein how stupid medieval Europeans living before the time of Copernicus must have been that they could have looked at the sky and thought that the sun was circling the earth. Surely a modicum of astronomical good sense would have told them that the reverse was true. Wittgenstein is said to have replied: “I agree. But I wonder what it would have looked like if the sun had been circling the earth.”

Voltaire, Philosopher

“Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy; the mad daughter of a wise mother.”
 
Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher

“Empirical sciences prosecuted purely for their own sake, and without philosophic tendency, are like a face without eyes.”

George Henry Lewes, Biographer

“A cell is regarded as the true biological atom.”
 
Sir Bernard Lovell, Physicist

“The pursuit of the good and evil are now linked in astronomy as in almost all science. … The fate of human civilization will depend on whether the rockets of the future carry the astronomer’s telescope or a hydrogen bomb.”
 
Alexis Carrel, Physiologist Nobel Laureate

“There is a strange disparity between the sciences of inert matter and those of life. Astronomy, mechanics, and physics are based on concepts which can be expressed, tersely and elegantly, in mathematical language. They have built up a universe as harmonious as the monuments of ancient Greece. They weave about it a magnificent texture of calculations and hypotheses. They search for reality beyond the realm of common thought up to unutterable abstractions consisting only of equations of symbols. Such is not the position of biological sciences. Those who investigate the phenomena of life are as if lost in an inextricable jungle, in the midst of a magic forest, whose countless trees unceasingly change their place and their shape. They are crushed under a mass of facts, which they can describe but are incapable of defining in algebraic equations.”
 
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, Astrophysicist

“When I hear to-day protests against the Bolshevism of modern science and regrets for the old-established order, I am inclined to think that Rutherford, not Einstein, is the real villain of the piece. When we compare the universe as it is now supposed to be with the universe as we had ordinarily preconceived it, the most arresting change is not the rearrangement of space and time by Einstein but the dissolution of all that we regard as most solid into tiny specks floating in void. That gives an abrupt jar to those who think that things are more or less what they seem. The revelation by modern physics of the void within the atom is more disturbing than the revelation by astronomy of the immense void of interstellar space.”
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Philosopher

“The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.”
 
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Paleontologist

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

“Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.”

“In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.”
 
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