Fergus Cross

15 Quotes For Everyone Who Has Ever Sided With Science Over God

God is meant to explain the things we don't understand. 
Bianca Sparacino
August 23, 2016
“The notion of a law of nature did not arise out of the practice of science itself. Sometime in the seventeenth century, it was imported into discourse about science from Christian theology, both directly, and indirectly through mathematics. Originally, laws of nature were understood as God's laws for nature. Thus, behind the laws of nature was a lawgiver, from whence came the universality and necessity of such laws. It is still common for scientists and commentators on science to speak of nature as being 'governed' by laws of nature, which suggests that somewhere there might be a 'governor.'”
— Ronald N. Giere, Scientific Perspectivism
Tagged: Natural Law, Objectivity, Secularization, Theology, Truth, Secularized Theology, Secularization of Religious Concepts, Secular Theology
“Do you think someone is a worse painter if, having painted a model of what the finest and most beautiful human being would be like and having rendered every detail of his picture adequately, he could not prove that such a man could come into being?”
— Plato, The Republic
Tagged: Ideals, Implementing Dreams
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Tagged: God vs Science
“Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.”
— David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
Tagged: God vs Science
“The more I study science, the more I believe in God.’”
— Albert Einstein, Science Resurrects God
Tagged: God vs Science
“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
— Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993
Tagged: God vs Science
“If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents – the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts – i.e., Materialism and Astronomy – are mere accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.”
— C. S. Lewis, The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics
“Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Tagged: God vs Science
“What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.”
— Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Tagged: God vs Science
“I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experiences in a magnificently consistent order, but is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, god and eternity.”
— Erwin Schroedinger, Nature And The Greeks
Tagged: God vs Science
“God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand.”
— Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist
Tagged: God vs Science
“Science can have a purifying effect on religion, freeing it from beliefs of a pre-scientific age and helping us to a truer conception of God. At the same time, I am far from believing that science will ever give us the answers to all our questions.”
— Nevill Mott, A Life In Science
Tagged: God vs Science
“As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.’”
— Freeman Dyson, Disturbing The Universe (Sloan Foundation Science Series)
Tagged: God vs Science
“When I went to the moon I was a pragmatic test pilot. But when I saw the planet Earth floating in the vastness of space the presence of divinity became almost palpable and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident.”
— Edgar Mitchell, The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut's Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds, Revised Edition
Tagged: God vs Science
“Math . . . music .. . starry nights . . . These are secular ways of achieving transcendence, of feeling lifted into a grand perspective. It’s a sense of being awed by existence that almost obliterates the self. Religious people think of it as an essentially religious experience but it’s not. It’s an essentially human experience.”
— Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: God vs Science