Scientists on Religion

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François Arago, Physicist

“On certain occasions, the eyes of the mind can supply the want of the most powerful telescopes, and lead to astronomical discoveries of the highest importance.”
 
Michael Crichton, Author

"Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
 
Jonathan Wells, Molecular Biologist

“The controversy between Darwinism and intelligent design has the characteristics of major scientific revolutions in the past. Darwinists are losing power because they treat with contempt the very people on whom they depend the most: American taxpayers. The outcome of this scientific revolution will be decided by young people who have the courage to question dogmatism and follow the evidence wherever it leads.”
 
Julian Huxley, Biologist and Poet

Evolution: At the Mind’s Cinema
I turn the handle and the story starts:
Reel after reel is all astronomy,
Till life, enkindled in a niche of sky,
Leaps on the stage to play a million parts.
Life leaves the slime and through all ocean darts;
She conquers earth, and raises wings to fly;
Then spirit blooms, and learns how not to die,-
Nesting beyond the grave in others’ hearts.
I turn the handle: other men like me
Have made the film: and now I sit and look
In quiet, privileged like Divinity
To read the roaring world as in a book.
If this thy past, where shall they future climb,
O Spirit, built of Elements and Time?
 
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Paleontologist

“There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule. I know very well that this idea of spirit-matter is regarded as a hybrid monster, a verbal exorcism of a duality which remains unresolved in its terms. But I remain convinced that the objections made to it arise from the mere fact that few people can make up their minds to abandon an old point of view and take the risk of a new idea. … Biologists or philosophers cannot conceive a biosphere or noosphere because they are unwilling to abandon a certain narrow conception of individuality. Nevertheless, the step must be taken.”
 
Hermann Bondi, Mathematician

“What I remember most clearly was that when I put down a suggestion that seemed to me cogent and reasonable, Einstein did not in the least contest this, but he only said, ‘Oh, how ugly.’ As soon as an equation seemed to him to be ugly, he really rather lost interest in it and could not understand why somebody else was willing to spend much time on it. He was quite convinced that beauty was a guiding principle in the search for important results in theoretical physics.”
 
Harlow Shapely, Astronomer

“I think it would be a very rash presumption to think that nowhere else in the cosmos has nature repeated the strange experiment which she has performed on earth—that the whole purpose of creation has been staked on this one planet alone. It is probable that dotted through the cosmos there are other suns which provide the energy for life to attendant planets. It is apparent, however, that planets with just the right conditions of temperature, oxygen, water and atmosphere necessary for life are found rarely.
But uncommon as a habitable planet may be, non-terrestrial life exists, has existed and will continue to exist. In the absence of information, we can only surmise that the chance that it surpasses our own is as good as that it falls below our level.”

“If God did create the world by a word, the word would have been hydrogen.”
 
Brian Pippard, Physicist

“What is surely impossible is that a theoretical physicist, given unlimited computing power, should deduce from the laws of physics that a certain complex structure is aware of its own existence.”
 
Eric Chaisson, Astrophysicist

“Why is there a Universe? Scientists simply don’t know how to address why questions. They are out of the present formulation of modern science…Nor do we know, or have any prospect of ever knowing, why there is a Universe.”

“… Nature almost surely operates by combining chance with necessity, randomness with determinism…”
 
John Wheeler, Physicist

“Is the very mechanism for the universe to come into being meaningless or unworkable or both unless the universe is guaranteed to produce life, consciousness and observership somewhere and for some little time in its history-to-be?”
 
John Polkinghorne, Theoretical Physicist

“It is the faithfulness of God that allows epistemology to model ontology.”

“God didn’t produce a ready-made world. The Creator has done something cleverer than this, making a world able to make itself.”
 
Kurt Gödel, Mathematician

“Einstein’s religion is more abstract, like that of Spinoza and Indian philosophy. My own religion is more similar to the religion of the churches. Spinoza’s God is less than a person. Mine is more than a person, because God can’t be less than a person. He can play the role of a person. There are spirits which have no body but can communicate with and influence the world. They keep [themselves] in the background today and are not known. It was different in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, when there were miracles. Think about deja vu and thought transference. The nuclear processes, unlike the chemical , are irrelevant to the brain.”
 
Irwin Schroedinger, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our bodies belong to it. Not only my own body, but those of my friends, also of my dog and cat and horse, and of all the other people and animals. And this is my only means of communicating with them.”

“Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.”
 
Donald Page, Physicist

“It is an unproved assumption that our multiverse, if our universe is indeed part of a multiverse, is either eternal or uncreated-and of course God could have created an eternal multiverse.”

“God creates and sustains the entire universe rather than just the beginning. Whether or not the Universe has a beginning has no relevance to the question of its creation, just as whether the artist’s line has a beginning and an end, or instead forms a circle with no end, has no relevance to the question of its being drawn.”
 
"After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.’” — James Boswell, Biographer

“The stone that Dr. Johnson once kicked to demonstrate the reality of matter has become dissipated in a diffuse distribution of mathematical probabilities. The ladder that Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz erected in order to scale the heavens rests upon a continually shifting, unstable foundation.” — Morris Kline, Mathematician
 
Morris Kline, Mathematician

“In brief, the whole world is the totality of mathematically expressible motions of objects in space and time, and the entire universe is a great, harmonious, and mathematically designed machine.”

“Perhaps the best reason for regarding mathematics as an art is not so much that it affords an outlet for creative activity as that it provides spiritual values. It puts man in touch with the highest aspirations and loftiest goals. It offers intellectual delight and the exultation of resolving the mysteries of the universe.”
 
Steven Weinberg, Physicist

“According to the standard big-bang theory the universe came into existence in a moment of infinite temperature and density some ten to fifteen billion years ago. Again and again when I have given a talk about the big-bang theory someone in the audience during the question period has argued that the idea of a beginning is absurd; whatever moment we say saw the beginning of the big bang, there must have been a moment before that one. I have tried to explain that this is not necessarily so. It is true for instance that in our ordinary experience however cold it gets it is always possible for it to get colder, but there is such a thing as absolute zero; we cannot reach temperatures below absolute zero not because we are not sufficiently clever but because temperatures below absolute zero simply have no meaning. Stephen Hawking has offered what may be a better analogy; it makes sense to ask what is north of Austin or Cambridge or any other city, but it makes no sense to ask what is north of the North Pole."
 
Alain Aspect, Physicist

“It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of the consciousness is the ultimate universal reality.”
 
Nevill Francis Mott, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“Neither physical science nor psychology can ever ‘explain’ human consciousness. To me then, human consciousness lies outside science, and it is here that I seek the relationship between God and man.”
 
Roy Peacock, Science Professor

“I began my questioning from the point of view of design, what we observe in life. How was it I could look down a microscope and see a pattern, and I could look up into the sky, the two extremes in terms of spatial size, and I could still see patterns and organization. That was the first question I asked myself. So there’s lots of illustrative evidence there. But the ultimate evidence is in one’s own heart. That’s where it counts; and that’s where it happened with me. It was the establishing of a heart centered relationship with a God - who previously I didn’t even believe existed. But suddenly I knew was there.”
 
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