Scientists on Religion

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International Theological Commission, Communion & Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God – July 2004

“While the story of human origins is complex and subject to revision, physical anthropology and molecular biology combine to make a convincing case for the origin of the human species in Africa about 150,000 years ago in a humanoid population of common genetic lineage. However it is to be explained, the decisive factor in human origins was a continually increasing brain size, culminating in that of homo sapiens. With the development of the human brain, the nature and rate of evolution were permanently altered: with the introduction of the uniquely human factors of consciousness, intentionality, freedom and creativity, biological evolution was recast as social and cultural evolution.”
 
Albert Einstein, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“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 Sagan, Astronomer

“An [dogmatic] atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists….”
 
G.K. Chesterton, Author

“Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.”
 
C.S. Lewis, Author

“In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.”
 
William Shakespeare, King Lear

“This is the excellent foppery of the world: that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeits of our own behaviour—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon’s tail and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows that I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.”
 
Joseph H. Taylor, Jr, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“A scientific discovery is also a religious discovery. There is no conflict between science and religion. Our knowledge of God is made larger with every discovery we make about the world.”
 
Arno Penzias, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole, in that the universe appears to have order and purpose.”
 
Max Planck, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”
 
Michael J. Behe, Microbiologist

“In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted… Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.”
 
Michael Faraday, Physicist

“The book of nature which we have to read is written by the finger of God.”
 
Jonathan Wells, Cell Biologist

“If Darwinists are opposed to mentioning scientific problems with their view, you would think they would be even more opposed to mentioning intelligent design. Yet Darwinists have been discussing ID in public school science classes for years… Biology textbooks have been mentioning intelligent design since the late 1990s—but only to misrepresent and disparage it.”

“Teaching students the evidence for and against Darwinism is not the same as teaching intelligent design. The U.S. Congress has officially endorsed teaching students ‘the full range of scientific views’ about Darwinian evolution.”
 
C.S. Lewis, Author

‎"Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God."
 
Georges Edouard Lemaitre, Big Bang Theory

“Should a priest reject relativity because it contains no authoritative exposition on the doctrine of the Trinity? Once you realize that the Bible does not purport to be a textbook of science, the old controversy between religion and science vanishes . . . The doctrine of the Trinity is much more abstruse than anything in relativity or quantum mechanics; but, being necessary for salvation, the doctrine is stated in the Bible. If the theory of relativity had also been necessary for salvation, it would have been revealed to Saint Paul or to Moses.”
 
C.S. Lewis, Author

"… the laws of Nature explain everything except the source of events. But this is rather a formidable exception. The laws, in one sense, cover the whole of reality except–well, except that continuous cataract of real events which makes up the actual universe. They explain everything except what we should ordinarily call ‘everything’. The only thing they omit is — the whole universe.”
 
Albert Einstein, Physicist

“Why does this magnificent applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it. In war it serves that we may poison and mutilate each other. In peace it has made our lives hurried and uncertain. Instead of freeing us in great measure from spiritually exhausting labor, it has made men into slaves of machinery, who for the most part complete their monotonous long day’s work with disgust and must continually tremble for their poor rations. … It is not enough that you should understand about applied science in order that your work may increase man’s blessings. Concern for the man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors; concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.”
 
Carl Sundell, Author

“There is a conviction among some that what is not demonstrable is not to be believed.
Now, while the moment the Big Bang began is to a degree demonstrable, say about 14 billions of years ago, what we cannot demonstrate precisely how or why how it began. That is clouded in mystery. And it is clouded in a mystery that we shall probably not ever be able to solve in scientific terms. Therefore, it may reasonably be concluded that the origins of all beings in the universe may be traced back to a mystery. Science at this point joins religion in having to face the limitations of human reason that must resort to God to explain everything, or it must resort to the absurdity of no explanation whatever. In either case, all things end in mystery, and this can be believed because it is demonstrable.”
 
Max Planck, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.”

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”

" … it is no wonder, that the movement of atheists, which declares religion to be just a deliberate illusion, invented by power-seeking priests, and which has for the pious belief in a higher Power nothing but words of mockery, eagerly makes use of progressive scientific knowledge and in a presumed unity with it, expands in an ever faster pace its disintegrating action on all nations of the earth and on all social levels. I do not need to explain in any more detail that after its victory not only all the most precious treasures of our culture would vanish, but — which is even worse — also any prospects at a better future."
 
Roger Bacon, Medieval Friar and Scientist

“There are four great sciences, without which the other sciences cannot be known nor a knowledge of things secured … Of these sciences the gate and key is mathematics … He who is ignorant of this [mathematics] cannot know the other sciences nor the affairs of this world.”
 
Blaise Pascal, Mathematician, Inventor

“Whilst in speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we love can them…the saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity.”
 
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