Scientists on Religion

  • Thread starter Thread starter Charlemagne_III
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
C.S. Lewis, Author

“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such a violent reaction against it?… Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if i did that, then my argument against God collapsed too–for the argument depended on saying the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist – in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless – I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality – namely my idea of justice – was full of sense. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”
 
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.”
 
Edwin Powell Hubble, Astronomer

“Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The body of positive knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.”

“Wisdom cannot be directly transmitted, and does not readily accumulate through the ages.”
 
Carlo Rubbia, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“The more you observe nature, the more you perceive that there is tremendous organization in all things. It is an intelligence so great that just by observing natural phenomena I come to the conclusion that a Creator exists.”
 
William Faulkner, Novelist

“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poets, the writers, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poets voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
 
Robert Louis Stevenson, Novelist, Poet

“It is a sore thing to have labored along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.”
 
Herman Melville, Novelist

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.”
 
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Novelist

“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
 
Edgar Allan Poe, Poet

“Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy—since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.”

‘‘As an individual, I myself feel impelled to fancy … a limitless succession of Universes… Each exists, apart and independently, in the bosom of its proper and particular God.’’
 
Truman Capote, Author

“It’s a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year.”
 
Pope Pius XI

“This [the opening of the Vatican City radio station built by Marconi earlier in 1931] was a new demonstration of the harmony between science and religion that each fresh conquest of science ever more luminously confirms, so that one may say that those who speak of the incompatibility of science and religion either make science say that which it never said or make religion say that which it never taught.”
 
Thomas Edison, Scientist, Inventor

“Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge.”
 
Christiaan Huygens, Mathematician

“It’s evident God had no design to make a particular Enumeration in the Holy Scriptures, of all the Works of his Creation.”
 
David Bohm, Physicist

“We have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent “elementary parts” of the world are the fundamental reality, and that the various systems are merely particular contingent forms and arrangements of these parts. Rather, we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and that relatively independent behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole.”

“In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe. We are enfolded in the universe.”
 
Thomas Merton, Mystic

“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.”
 
Werner Heisenberg, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“In the philosophy of Democritus the atoms are eternal and indestructible units of matter, they can never be transformed into each other. With regard to this question modern physics takes a definite stand against the materialism of Democritus and for Plato and the Pythagoreans. The elementary particles are certainly not eternal and indestructible units of matter, they can actually be transformed into each other. As a matter of fact, if two such particles, moving through space with a very high kinetic energy, collide, then many new elementary particles may be created from the available energy and the old particles may have disappeared in the collision. Such events have been frequently observed and offer the best proof that all particles are made of the same substance: energy. But the resemblance of the modern views to those of Plato and the Pythagoreans can be carried somewhat further. The elementary particles in Plato’s Timaeus are finally not substance but mathematical forms. “All things are numbers” is a sentence attributed to Pythagoras. The only mathematical forms available at that time were such geometric forms as the regular solids or the triangles which form their surface. In modern quantum theory there can be no doubt that the elementary particles will finally also be mathematical forms but of a much more complicated nature.”
 
Mark Twain, Novelist

“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

Miguel de Unamuno, Novelist

“Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.”
 
Werner Heisenberg, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity ? And why turbulence ? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.”
 
**Mother Teresa **

"The greatest science in the world, in heaven and on earth, is love.”
 
Kitty Ferguson, Science Writer

“There are those who believe in God who see no philosophical advantage in the Big Bang over Steady State theory. They point out that the Judaeo-Christian God creates and sustains the universe continually and perhaps eternally (if the universe is eternal), and that whether or not there was a beginning of time has no relevance to the question of whether or not God is the creator.”
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top