Scientists on Religion

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Ernest Rutherford, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.”
 
Abraham Pais, Physicist

“To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery.”
 
John Ziman, Physicist

“The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true; the contents of the primary research journals of physics is 90% false.”
 
Charles Darwin, Evolutionist

“The question of whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the Universe has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed.”
 
Kitty Ferguson, Science Writer

“More perhaps than anything else, what sets religious evidence apart is not really its inability to be corroborated or its failure to be ‘public evidence’ by the standard of science, but its very richness. Religion and science, as well as art, music, and literature - are all rooted in human experience. There is of course a commonality to that experience, but that the most fundamental level human experience can never be shared, and all knowledge enters first on that level. Science is eager to process this knowledge into public knowledge by moving on as rapidly as possible to comparison, argument, and consensus - and that processing has served us magnificently for learning about the physical universe. However, some skepticism might be the better part of wisdom when it comes to the use of this same process as the ultimate arbiter of the validity of all human experience.”
 
Alfred North Whitehead, Mathematician, Philosopher

“Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.”

“Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God. The presentation of God under the aspect of power awakens every modern instinct of critical reaction. This is fatal; for religion collapses unless its main positions command immediacy of assent. In this respect the old phraseology is at variance with the psychology of modern civilizations. This change in psychology is largely due to science, and is one of the chief ways in which the advance of science has weakened the hold of the old religious forms of expression.”

“Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.”

“The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.”

“The power of God is the worship He inspires… The worship of God is not a rule of safety — it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.”

“God is that function in the world by reason of which our purposes are direct to ends which in our own consciousness are impartial as to our own interests. He is that element in life in virtue of which judgment stretches beyond facts of existence to values of existence … that element in virtue of which our purposes extend beyond values for ourselves to values for others … that element in virtue of which the attainment of such a value for others transforms itself into value for ourselves… He is the binding element in the world. The consciousness which is individual in us, is universal in him; the love which is partial in us is all-embracing in him …”
 
Sir John C. Eccles, Physiologist Nobel Laureate

“I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition. … We have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.”
 
Murray S. Daw, Physicist

“The proper integration of science into Catholic culture requires nothing less than a full understanding of how science relates to a complete view of faith, of the world, of life as a whole, even of existence itself. Sadly, the great majority of Catholics are unaware that such integration is even possible. Indeed, I assert that the chasm between science and Catholic culture has never been wider.”

“As a former professor visiting his former university in Regensburg, Germany, Pope Benedict XVI identified the crisis of reason as the root problem of the West. Human reason, reduced in modern times to empirical rationality, has forgotten what it means to be human, with tragic consequences. No longer capable of the clear perception of order, goodness, and intelligibility, our culture has reduced morality to relativism, a utilitarian calculus devoid of true reason. Who needs to be reminded of the results?”
 
Colin Patterson, Paleontologist

“You say I should at least ‘show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.’ I will lay it on the line – there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test.”
 
Paul C. Fox, Physician

"Nearly twenty-five years ago, when I entered medical school, I was an agnostic, in large measure because years of indoctrination in the public schools and by the media had left me convinced that Darwin’s theory of evolution was true beyond question. Therefore there was no need for the “God hypothesis” and no intellectual justification for it. Agnosticism was comfortable; it allowed me to feel smugly superior to believers without having to make the effort to be a reasoned unbeliever. Moreover, since human moral codes were mere byproducts of material evolution, I felt free to improvise my own standards of behavior. I could do pretty much anything I wanted.

“My cozy and convenient world was shaken when I began to study biochemistry in the first year of med school. Exposed to the full intricacy of even the most “primitive” bacterium, I began to have the uneasy feeling that all this complexity at such a fundamental level could not be the product of mere random events, even events over billions of years. This suspicion, as I began to look into the matter, ripened into the conviction that life originated by design rather than by chance. Design meant a Designer. And so began for me the long and convoluted search that led me first to Theism, then to Christianity, and in the end to Catholicism. It is a journey that not a few have made before me and that many more (I hope) will make in the future.”
 
** Eugene Wigner**, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“While a number of philosophical ideas may be logically consistent with present quantum mechanics, materialism is not.”
 
Christopher Beiting, Historian

“Pascal’s Wager, however interesting it is to some folk, is in reality only a very small part of Pascal’s thought, and a disproportionate focus on it is a common mistake I have seen countless of my freshmen college students make. The Wager is not an end; rather, it is a beginning. Pascal is not, in actuality, interested in trying to “prove” the existence of God to his readers. The Wager is only a starting point. Pascal was no mere theist – he was a committed Christian, dedicated to trying to get his readers not to know God but to love Christ. Indeed, Pascal asserts, one cannot really know God at all apart from Christ (#449), and as a result Pascal is as hostile to the Deist as he is to the Muslim (#321), and as critical of the Jews for not recognizing Christ (#502) as he is admiring of them for bequeathing Him to the world (#451-455). To Pascal it was actually dangerous to know God apart from Christ! But how, then, does one know Christ? We can only know Him through Scripture (#417), as well as orthodox belief and membership in the Church (#733). These ideas are the core of what was truly most important to Blaise Pascal, and are critical to understanding him.”
 
Charles Duke, Apollo 16 Lunar Module Pilot

“To me, the scientific evidence that we observe in the universe, the intricacies of life with all of its implications of intelligent design, the orderliness of the physical universe…all of these point to a designer, not to an accidental happening.”
 
Benjamin Wiker, Ethicist

"We happen to live in a time that would be most interesting to read about if only we didn’t have to live in it. We live in a time of complete moral revolution, when moral boundaries are being crossed so quickly that they fly past in a blur like so many telephone poles, as we hurtle into the new millennium. If we flipped through newspapers during the last half-century we would see the divorce rate blossom, the introduction and wild spread of legalized abortion, sexual hysteria, men marrying men, women marrying women, in vitro fertilization of a grandmother with the eggs of her daughter fertilized by her son-in-law, pedophiles clamoring for legal recognition, partial-birth infanticide, the marketing of “fresh” baby parts from abortion clinics, and now a British panel recommending human cloning for cell research. Interesting. Very interesting.

Yet there are, occasionally, good revolutions, and there is one going on right now, a scientific revolution, which is not only very interesting (in a good sense), but could also bring welcome aid to those of us battered so miserably in the battles of the ever-spiraling moral revolution. The Intelligent Design (ID) movement in science promises to undo a half-millennium of secularization, both in the intellectual and moral realms."
 
Will Durant, Historian, Philosopher

“Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.”
 
Arnold Toynbee, Historian

“Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.”

“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”

“Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case… we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two.”
 
Ashwin Sanghi, Novelist

“Physicists explain creation by telling us that the universe began with the Big Bang, an intense energy singularity that continued expanding. But pray, please do explain who created the singularity?”
 
Max Planck, Physicist Nobel Laureate

“No matter where and how far we look, nowhere do we find a contradiction between religion and natural science. On the contrary, we find a complete concordance in the very points of decisive importance. Religion and natural science do not exclude each other, as many contemporaries of ours would believe or fear. They mutually supplement and condition each other. The most immediate proof of the compatibility of religion and natural science, even under the most thorough critical scrutiny, is the historical fact that the very greatest natural scientists of all times — men such as Kepler, Newton, Leibniz — were permeated by a most profound religious attitude.”
 
Albert Einstein, Physicist

“I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman’s irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.”
 
Archbishop Fulton Sheen

“There are fads in science, just as there are fads in clothes.”
 
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