Scientists on Religion

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Thomas Aquinas, Theologian

“We hold it by faith alone, and it cannot be proved by demonstration, that the world did not always exist … the reason being that the newness of the world cannot be demonstrated by the world itself.”
 
Willem de Sitter, Physicist

“Purely mathematical symbols have no meaning by themselves; it is the privilege of pure mathematicians, to quote Bertrand Russell, not to know what they are talking about. …It is the physicist, and not the mathematician, who must know what he is talking about.”

“There is another side to the theory of relativity. We have pointed out in the beginning how the development of science is in the direction to make it less subjective, to separate more and more in the observed facts that which belongs to the reality behind the phenomena, the absolute, from the subjective element, which is introduced by the observer, the relative. Einstein’s theory is a great step in that direction. We can say that the theory of relativity is intended to remove entirely the relative and exhibit the pure absolute.”

“Let the universe have only two dimensions, and let it be the surface of an india rubber ball. It is only the surface that is the universe, not the ball itself. …Let there be specks of dust fixed to the surface to represent the different galactic systems. If the ball is inflated, the universe expands, and these specks of dust will recede from each other, their mutual distances, measured along the surface, will increase in the same rate as the radius of the ball. An observer in any one of the specks will see all the others receding from himself, but it does not follow that he is the center of the universe. The universe (which is the surface of the ball, not the ball itself) has no center.”
 
Albert Einstein, Physicist

“Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.”
 
’Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Architect

"God is in the details. ‘’
 
Albert Einstein, Physicist

“I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking but by immutable laws.”

“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts. The rest are details.”
 
Carl Sundell, Author

“Einstein agreed with Spinoza that other human attributes besides intelligence cannot exist in the mind of God, as he made abundantly clear in his rejection of a personal God. “I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own – a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.” Though Einstein could see God possessing supreme intelligence, he could not see God reflecting any aspect of supreme love or justice or mercy. Why he could see the one human trait in God but not the others seems a type of special pleading typical of deists and pantheists. Possibly this was because, reflecting on the supremacy of intellect in his own person, Einstein saw intellect as the human trait that dominates all other traits. Thus Einstein’s God reflects Einstein’s own image and likeness. Perhaps now we can understand the comment by Einstein’s wife Elsa on Einstein’s powers of observation: ‘You cannot analyze him, otherwise you will misjudge him. Such a genius should be irreproachable in every respect. But no, nature doesn’t behave like this. Where she gives extravagantly, she takes away extravagantly.’”
 
Werner Heisenberg, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.”

“Where no guiding ideals are left to point the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaning of our deeds and sufferings, and at the end can lie only negation and despair. Religion is therefore the foundation of ethics, and ethics the presupposition of life.”
 
Albert Einstein, Physicist

“Morality is of the highest importance – but for us, not for God.”

“*Nostra Culpa! *We are guilty!” (concerning his role in developing the atomic bomb)
 
Max Jammer, Physicist

“The theological issue in question is the conflict between the traditional doctrine of God’s creation of the world out of nothing, creatio ex nihilo, and the physical law of the conservation of energy or mass. In 1958, Henry Margenau proposed a solution to this conflict by appealing to the mass-energy relation. In a study of Thomas Aquinas in the light of modern physics, Margenau declared that Thomas’s affirmation in his De Potentia, ‘that God can and does make something from nothing should be steadfastly held’ was anathema to the scientists of the last century. But Margenau continued, ’ relativity has changed all this, and it is a curious fact, perhaps not widely known, that creation of matter out of nothing contradicts no physical conservation law.’”
 
Banesh Hoffman, Physicist

“It did not cause anxiety that Maxwell’s equations did not apply to gravitation, since nobody expected to find any link between electricity and gravitation at that particular level. But now physics was faced with an entirely new situation. The same entity, light, was at once a wave and a particle. How could one possibly imagine its proper size and shape? To produce interference it must be spread out, but to bounce off electrons it must be minutely localized. This was a fundamental dilemma, and the stalemate in the wave-photon battle meant that it must remain an enigma to trouble the soul of every true physicist. It was intolerable that light should be two such contradictory things. It was against all the ideals and traditions of science to harbor such an unresolved dualism gnawing at its vital parts. Yet the evidence on either side could not be denied, and much water was to flow beneath the bridges before a way out of the quandary was to be found. The way out came as a result of a brilliant counterattack initiated by the wave theory, but to tell of this now would spoil the whole story. It is well that the reader should appreciate through personal experience the agony of the physicists of the period. They could but make the best of it, and went around with woebegone faces sadly complaining that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays they must look on light as a wave; on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, as a particle. On Sundays they simply prayed.”
 
Hans Kung, Theologian

“I am firmly convinced that there is life after death, not in a primitive sense but as the entry of my completely finite person into God’s infinity, as a transition into another reality beyond the dimension of space and time that pure reason can neither affirm nor deny.”
 
Albert Einstein, Physicist

“The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal, which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives us a sure foundation for our aspirations and valuations.”
 
Pope John Paul II

“Through the natural sciences, and cosmology in particular, we have become much more aware of our true physical position within the universe, within physical reality - in space and time. We are struck very forcibly by our smallness and apparent insignificance, and even more by our vulnerability in such a vast and seemingly hostile environment. Yet this universe of ours, this galaxy in which our sun is situated and this planet on which we live, is our home. And all of it in some way or other serves to support us, nourish us, fascinate us, inspire us, taking us out of ourselves and forcing us to look far beyond the limits of our unaided vision. What we discover through our study of the universe in all its immensity and rich variety serves on the one hand to emphasize our fragile condition and our littleness, and on the other hand to manifest clearly our greatness and superiority in the midst of all creation - the profoundly exalted position we enjoy in being able to search, to imagine and to discover so much.”
 
Mariano Artigas, Physicist, Philosopher, Theologian

“The existence of disorder and evil is the most serious objection against the theistic view. Indeed, it seems that the existence of an omnipotent God who governs the world should entail a perfection of his works that should not leave room for natural disorder. Thus, a central prediction of theism would be false. The classical answer to this well-known objection lies in remembering that disorder and evil can be included within God’s plan if preventing their existence would entail greater evils or prevent the existence of greater goods. The present scientific worldview adds an important argument. Indeed, if the natural world is the result of evolution, then the existence of disorder and physical evil in nature seems unavoidable except by a continuous miracle. In addition, evolution seems reasonable if God wants to produce the world by using and respecting natural causes.”

“We can represent our world as an unfinished symphony where we have a role to play. We can even understand that God permits the existence of evil so that we may really play our role with freedom, responsibility, and merit. If we live a divine life, we will live with God forever. But this is another story.”
 
Karl Popper, Philosopher of Science

“What is notable about human knowledge is that it has grown so very far beyond all animal knowledge, and that it is still growing.”

“Now I want to emphasize how little is said by saying that the mind is an emergent product of the brain. It has practically no explanatory value, and it hardly amounts to more than putting a question mark at a certain place in human evolution. Nevertheless, I think that this is all which, from a Darwinian point of view, we can say about it … evolution certainly cannot be taken in any sense as an ultimate explanation. We must come to terms with the fact that we live in a world in which almost everything which is very important is left essentially unexplained … ultimately everything is left unexplained.”
 
Paul Davies, Physicist

“… the fact that science works, and works so well, points to something profoundly significant about the organization of the cosmos… What is a surprise is that human reasoning is so successful in framing an understanding of those parts of the world our perceptions can’t directly reach. It may be no surprise that human minds can deduce the laws of falling objects, because the brain has evolved to devise strategies for dodging them. But do we have the right to expect extensions of such reasoning to work when it comes to nuclear physics or astrophysics, for example? The fact that it does work, and works ‘unreasonably’ well, is one of the great mysteries of the universe.”
 
G.K. Chesterton, Author

“The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything else. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world.”
 
Mariano Artigas, Physicist, Philosopher, Theologian

“A personal being requires a personal cause.”

“Of course, arguments based on natural teleology cannot provide a detailed knowledge of God’s plan. Although teleology is sometimes seen as unknowable because divine plans are identified with deterministic and linear processes, this is an arbitrary assumption that derives from an anthropomorphic idea of God.”
 
James Gleick, Science Historian

“The universe is randomness and dissipation. But randomness with direction can produce surprising complexity. And as Lorenz discovered so long ago, dissipation is an agent of order. ‘God plays dice with the universe’ is Ford’s answer to Einstein’s famous question. ‘But they’re loaded dice. And the main objectives of physics now is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how we can use them for our own ends.’”
 
James Gleick, Science Historian

“The universe is randomness and dissipation. But randomness with direction can produce surprising complexity. And as Lorenz discovered so long ago, dissipation is an agent of order. ‘God plays dice with the universe’ is [Joseph] Ford’s answer to Einstein’s famous question. ‘But they’re loaded dice. And the main objectives of physics now is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how we can use them for our own ends.’”
 
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