Scientists on Religion

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Mary Shelley, Novelist

“Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.”
 
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Astrophysicist

“The pursuit of science has often been compared to the scaling of mountains, high and not so high. But who amongst us can hope, even in imagination, to scale the Everest and reach its summit when the sky is blue and the air is still, and in the stillness of the air survey the entire Himalayan range in the dazzling white of the snow stretching to infinity? None of us can hope for a comparable vision of nature and of the universe around us. But there is nothing mean or lowly in standing in the valley below and awaiting the sun to rise over Kinchinjunga.”
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Vikram Sarabhai**, Physicist

“We look down on our scientists if they engage in outside consultation. We implicitly promote the ivory tower.”
 
Billy Graham, Evangelist

“I don’t think that there’s any conflict at all between science today and the scriptures. I think that we have misinterpreted the Scriptures many times and we’ve tried to make the Scriptures say things they weren’t meant to say, I think that we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The Bible is a book of Redemption, and of course I accept the Creation story. I believe that God did create the universe. I believe that God created man, and whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain point He took this person or being and made him a living soul or not, does not change the fact that God did create man. … whichever way God did it makes no difference as to what man is and man’s relationship to God.”
 
Peter Kreeft, Philosopher

“Science only answers the question, How does it work? Or at most, What’s there? Science asks what and how, philosophy asks why, myth and religion ask who. Who’s in charge here? Who’s the author? That’s what we really long to know.”

“If we had absolute proof instead of clues, then you could no more deny God than you could deny the sun. If we had no evidence at all, you could never get there. God gives us just enough evidence so that those who want him can have him.”
 
Francis Bacon, Philosopher of Science

“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.”
 
Abdus Salam, Theoretical Physicist Nobel Laureate

“The Holy Quran enjoins us to reflect on the verities of Allah’s created laws of nature; however, that our generation has been privileged to glimpse a part of His design is a bounty and a grace for which I render thanks with a humble heart.”
 
Peter Coveney, Physical Chemist

“It is unmatched in its ability to think, to communicate, and to reason. Most striking of all, it has a unique awareness of its identity and of its place in space and time. Welcome to the human brain, the cathedral of complexity.”
 
Plato Philosopher

“Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.”
 
Friedrich Schiller, Philosopher, Playwright

“To one, science is an exalted goddess; to another it is a cow which provides him with butter.”

“The universe is one at God’s thoughts.”

“Toil of science swells the wealth of art.”
 
Sheldon Lee Glashow, Theoretical Physicist Nobel Larureate

“We called the new [fourth] quark the “charmed quark” because we were pleased, and fascinated by the symmetry it brought to the subnuclear world. “Charm” also means a “a magical device to avert evil,” and in 1970 it was realized that the old three quark theory ran into very serious problems. … As if by magic the existence of the charmed quark would [solve those problems].”
 
Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“My colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands [and I] are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game. I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results. How can it be that writing down a few simple and elegant formulae, like short poems governed by strict rules such as those of the sonnet or the waka, can predict universal regularities of Nature?”
 
Vasant Natarajan, Physicist

“Einstein of course believed in mathematical laws of nature, so his idea of a God was at best someone who formulated the laws and then left the universe alone to evolve according to these laws.”.
 
George Stokes, Mathematician, Physicist

“I was capable of being moved, mathematically, as it were, by the belief that a particular course was right; and I do believe that God put these views in my mind, working by means of that which was in me to supply that which was wanting.”
 
Richard Wilbur, Poet

“Kick at the stone, Sam Johnson, break your bones,
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.”
 
Anonymous

Q: Why was Werner Heisenberg such a bad lover?

A: When he got the momentum, he couldn’t find the position, and when he found the position, he couldn’t muster up the momentum.
 
George Lemaitre, Mathematician Physicist

“He (the Christian researcher) knows that not one thing in all creation has been done without God, but he knows also that God nowhere takes the place of his creatures. Omnipresent divine activity is everywhere essentially hidden. It never had to be a question of reducing the supreme Being to the rank of a scientific hypothesis.”

“Does the Church need Science? Certainly not. The Cross and the Gospel are enough. However, nothing that is human can be foreign to the Christian. How could the Church not be interested in the most noble of all strictly human occupations, namely the search for truth?”
 
Gerald Schroeder, Physicist

“In the 1970s, Elso Barghoorn, a paleontologist, discovered micro-fossils of bacteria and algae in rocks close to 3.5 billion years old. Deposits representative of organic carbon appear in formations 3.8 billion years old. That is also when the first liquid water appeared on Earth, and hence the first time that life could survive. All life on Earth is water based. No water, no life, but with water, life was possible. It had only to develop, and develop it did, immediately in the presence of water. There were no ‘billions of years’ for the amino acids to combine randomly into life.”
 
Leon Lederman, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God.”
 
E. T. Bell, Mathematician

“Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth.” E. T. Bell
 
Paul Erdos, Mathematician

“God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers.”
 
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