Scientists on Religion

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Christian de Duve, Biochemist Nobel Laureate

“, chance did not operate in a vacuum. It operated in a universe governed by orderly laws and made of matter endowed with specific properties. These laws and properties are the constraints that shape the evolutionary roulette and restrict the numbers that it can turn up.”
 
Thomas Aquinas, Theologian

“Nature is nothing but the plan of some art, namely a divine one, put into things themselves, by which those things move toward a concrete end: as if the man who builds up a ship could give to the pieces of wood that they could move by themselves to produce the form of the ship.”
 
J.F. Haught, Theologian

“Remarkable as it may seem, If God is to create a world truly distinct from the divine Self, such a world would have to have an internal “self-coherence” or autonomy. Simply in order to be the “world” and not God, the creation has to be different from its Creator. This implies, then, that divine creativity allows the world to be itself.”
 
Thomas Kuhn, Physicist, Philosopher of Science

“During the seventeenth century, just when its full utility was being demonstrated for the first time, scholastic science was bitterly attacked by men trying to weave a radically new fabric of thought. The scholastics proved easy to ridicule, and the image has stuck. Medieval scientists more often found their problems in texts rather than in nature; many of those problems do not seem problems at all; by modern standards the practice of science during the Middle Ages was incredibly inefficient. But how else could science have been reborn in the West? The centuries of scholasticism are the centuries in which the tradition of ancient science and philosophy was simultaneously reconstituted, assimilated, and tested for adequacy. As weak spots were discovered, they immediately became foci for the first effective research in the modern world. The great new scientific theories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries all originate from rents torn by scholastic criticism in the fabric of Aristotelian thought. Most of those theories also embody key concepts created by scholastic science. And more important even than this is the attitude that modern scientists inherited from their medieval predecessors: and unbounded faith in the power of human reason to solve the problems of nature. As the late Professor Whitehead remarked, ‘Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.’”
 
Joseph Zycinski, Philosopher of Science

“Cosmologists for a long time have been intrigued by the question of why life appeared so late in a universe which has been expanding for 20 billion years, and why the density of matter in the universe is so small that successive generations continually relive Pascalian anxiety in their experience of the emptiness of infinite spaces. Modern cosmology supplies a partial explanation. Even if life were to develop in only one place, a large and old universe would have been required. Billions of years of cosmic evolution are necessary for the appearance of carbon producing stars, an indispensable element for the rise of known forms of life.”
 
John Barrow and Frank Tipler, Physicists

“Although [Francis] Bacon certainly did not wish to deny that Nature may both possess and display some divine purpose, he objected to the use of this belief in generating teleological “explanations” which then became intermingled with the empirical investigations of the physical sciences… For Bacon, final causes have a role to play only in metaphysics. In physics, experience guides us to exclude them. With Bacon’s ideas we see the beginning of a trend that has continued to the present day with most scientists qua scientists ignoring “ultimate” questions; and instead, concentrating on more limited local problems and the interconnection between material and efficient causes.”
 
Carl Sundell, Author

“Francis Bacon delivered the fatal blow to final causality in modern science, producing a great divide between physics and metaphysics that it is almost impossible to bridge today in scientific speculation. This is, however, more true of the physical sciences than of the social sciences. Because man is familiar in his own experience with design, even to the point of *designing *his own scientific experiments, he knows that teleology has a legitimate place in the art of scientific deduction. The final cause of every scientific experiment is to discover a truth about the world. Teleology, it seems, is alive and well so long as man, not God, is the teleologist.”
 
George Coyne , Priest, Astronomer

“I have never come to know God, to see God, to believe in God through doing science. He’s not the conclusion of some sort of process of my personal scientific investigation.”

“The technological overflow from scientific research has brought scientific research this bad name about carrying an irresponsibility and an alienation from God - because scientific research has led to things like the atom bomb, it’s led to problems with depletion of ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere, or at least it’s revealed those problems.”

“I can’t see for the life of me how an attempt to understand the universe, which I believe comes from God, can alienate us from God.”
 
Mariano Artigas, Physicist, Philosopher

“An ichthyologist using a net whose holes are one square foot in size cannot say anything about the existence and properties of fish that measure less than a foot. In a similar vein, the study of spatiotemporal patterns by means of magnitudes and repeatable experiments cannot by itself affirm or deny the existence and values of metaphysics, spirituality, and religion. Thus scientism, which claims that we cannot find meaningful knowledge outside empirical science, is not itself a consequence of empirical science. It is rather the result of illegitimate extrapolations and, insofar as it presents itself as a consequence of science, it is a deceptive and contradictory kind of pseudoscience.”
 
Stanley Jaki, Theologian, Physicist

“Unlike an angel who needs no conquests, and unlike an ape uninterested in them, man thrives on conquests which are the fruit of a mysterious union in him of matter and mind.”
 
Paul Davies, Physicist

“It is one of the universal miracles of nature that huge assemblages of particles, subject only to the blind forces of nature, are nevertheless capable of organizing themselves into patterns of cooperative activity.”
 
Max Weber, Philosopher

“Who - aside from big children who are indeed found in the natural sciences - still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world? If there is any such ‘meaning,’ along what road would one come upon its tracks? If these natural sciences lead to anything in this way, they are apt to make the belief that there is such a thing as the ‘meaning’ of the universe die out at its very roots.”

“That science today is irreligious no one will doubt in his innermost being, even if he will not admit it to himself. Redemption from the rationalism and intellectualism of science is the fundamental presupposition of living in union with the divine.”
 
Seneca, Roman Philosopher

“What is God? The mind of the universe. What is God? The whole that you see and the whole that you do not see. Thus we return to him his magnitude, because we can think of nothing greater, if he alone is everything, if he sustains his work from within and from without.”
 
John Haught, Theologian

“I see four principal ways in which those who have thought about the problem express their understanding of the relationship of religion to science. (1) Some hold that religion is utterly opposed to science or that science invalidates religion. I shall call this the *conflict *position . (2) Others insist that religion and science are so clearly different from each other that conflict between them is logically impossible. Religion and science are both valid, but we should rigorously separate one from the other. This is the *contrast *approach. (3) A third type argues that although religion and science are distinct, science always has implications for religion and vice versa. Science and religion inevitably interact, and so religion and theology must not ignore new developments in science. For the sake of simplicity I shall call this the *contact *approach. (4) Finally, a fourth way of looking at the relationship - akin to but logically distinct from the third - emphasizes the subtle but significant ways in which religion positively supports the scientific adventure of discovery. It looks for those ways in which religion, without in any way interfering with science, paves the way for some of its ideas, and even gives a special kind of blessing, or what I shall call confirmation, to the scientific quest for truth.”
 
John Polkinghorne, Physicist, Theologian

“…there are questions which arise from science and which insistently demand an answer, but which by their very character transcend that of which science is competent to speak. There is a widespread feeling among practicing scientists, particularly those of us who have worked in fundamental physics, that there is more to the physical world than has met the scientific eye. As a result of that feeling, we are living in a time where there is a revival of natural theology taking place, largely at the hands of the scientists rather than the theologians.”
 
Langdon Gilkey, Theologian

“My critique is not of science, its methods, or its results but of this way of knowing as understood in relation to other, complementary ways of knowing. The view of science that I criticize (1) sees science as the only way to know reality and so the only responsible means for defining reality for us and (2) views the results of science as proving an exhaustive account of reality or nature and hence as leaving no rook for other modes of knowing, such as aesthetic, intuitive, speculative, or religious modes …”
 
Thomas Aquinas, Theologian

“As the Philosopher [Aristotle] teaches in his Politics, when several different things are ordained to a single one, one of them has to be the regulative or directive, the others regulated or directed…. But all sciences and arts are ordained to a single thing, namely the perfection of man, which is his happiness. Therefore one of them has to be directive of all the rest, and this one rightly should be called wisdom, because it is a character of the wise man to direct others.”
 
Carsten Bresch, Physicist, Geneticist

“If we were to describe the fundamental property of the matter of the universe in a single sentence, we would have to say matter is formed - or created - so as to show continually accelerating growth of patterns… Everything around us consists of patterns. Matter is patterned, atomically and molecularly. Organisms are enormous patterns of cells, each of which in turn consists of a wealth of biological patterns. The arrangement of the houses in a human settlement is just as much a pattern as are the positions of the pieces of furniture in a room. A song is a time-pattern of sequences of notes; a book is a pattern of letters. We are so used to being surrounded by patterns that we do not give a thought to this fundamental property of our world. But it is matter and pattern (structure, form) that determines the properties of an object.”
 
Thank you to all those who have participated in this discussion. This thread is now closed.
 
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