Cosmology and PhysicsIntroductionWelcome to our Cosmology and Physics quotes collection. Many of the quotes in our collections have been verified for accuracy, but not all have been verified. Thus, we present our quote-collections as a starting point for research, and suggest you verify any individual quote before using it. If you have information about problems or inaccuracies in any quotes, we welcome corrections. Please send them to us at: info@ideacenter.org. The Quotes: What subcategory of quotes would you like to see? "We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it." (Alexander Polyakov, [Russian physicist], Fortune Magazine (October, 1986).) "The temptation to believe that the Universe is the product of some sort of design, a manifestation of subtle aesthetic and mathematical judgment, is overwhelming. The belief that there is 'something behind it all' is one that I personally share with, I suspect, a majority of physicists." (Paul C. W. Davies, [Physicist and Professor of Natural Philosophy, University of Adelaide], "The Christian perspective of a scientist," reviewing "The way the world is," by John Polkinghorne, New Scientist, Vol. 98, No. 1354, pages 638-639 (June 2, 1983).) "The equations of physics have in them incredible simplicity, elegance, and beauty. That in itself is sufficient to prove to me that there must be a God who is responsible for these laws and responsible for the universe." (Paul Davies, Superforce, (1st. ed., Touchstone, 1984).) "If I were a religious man, I would say that everything we have learned about life in the past twenty years shows that we are unique, and therefore, special in God's sight." (Robert T. Rood and James S. Trefil [University of Virginia astronomers], Are We Alone? The Possibility of Extraterrestrial Civilizations, (1st ed., New York: Scribner, 1981).) "Taking the view, palatable to most ordinary folk but exceedingly unpalatable to scientists, that there is an enormous intelligence abroad in the Universe, it becomes necessary to write blind forces out of astronomy." (Fred Hoyle, "The Universe: Past and Present Reflections," Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Vol. 20, page 15 (1982).) "The existence of design and nature is a fact which must certainly be taken seriously ... [because] in every main branch of science- physics, geophysics, astronomy, chemistry, biology- we are faced by the same surprising fact.... Nearly everywhere it [nature] shows the signs.... of something that we can only think of in terms of ingenuity and deliberate design." (Robert E. D. Clark, [PhD, Organic Chemistry, Cambridge University], The Universe: Plan or Accident?, pages 151, 181 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1972).) "The more I study science, the more I believe in God." (Albert Einstein) "You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way...[T]he kind of order created by Newton’s theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different. Even if the axioms of the theory are proposed by man, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. That is the "miracle" which is being constantly reinforced as our world expands." (Albert Einstein, Letters to Solovine, page 131 (New York: Open Road/Philosophical Library, 1987).) "No feature of this uncanny "tuning" of the human mind to the workings of nature is more striking than mathematics. Mathematics is the product of the higher human intellect, yet it finds ready application to the most basic processes of nature, such as subatomic particle physics. The fact that "mathematics works" when applied to the physical world--and works so stunningly well--demands explanation, for it is not clear we have any absolute right to expect that the world should be well described by our mathematics ... If mathematical ability has evolved by accident rather than in response to environmental pressures, then it is a truly astonishing coincidence that mathematics finds such ready application to the physical universe. If, on the other hand, mathematical ability does have some obscure survival value and has evolved by natural selection, we are still faced with the mystery of why the laws of nature are mathematical. After all, surviving 'in the jungle' does not require knowledge of the laws of nature, only of their manifestation." (Paul Davies, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Science," Evidence of Purpose, page 554 (Templeton, 1997).) "The enormous usefulness of mathematics is something bordering on the mysterious......There is no rational explanation for it.......The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve..." (Eugene Wigner, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences", Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, 13: 1-14 (1960).) "All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way." (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, page 5 (London: Penguin, 1991).) "Let us recognize these speculations for what they are. They are not physics but, in the strictest sense, metaphysics. There is no purely scientific reason to believe in an ensemble of universes. By construction these other worlds are unknowable by us. A possible explanation of equal intellectual respectability - and to my mind greater economy and elegance - would be that this one world is the way it is because it is the creation of the will of a Creator who purposes that it should be so." (John C. Polkinghorne, [former Professor of Mathematical Physics, Cambridge University, and Anglican priest], One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology," page 80 (London: SPCK, 1987).) "Mr. Bird is concerned with origins and the evidence relevant thereto. He is basically correct that evidence, or proof, of origins-of the universe, of life, of all of the major groups of life, of all of the minor groups of life, indeed of all of the species-is weak or nonexistent when measured on an absolute scale, as it always was and will always be." (Gareth Nelson, [Chairman and Curator of the Department of Herpetology and Ichthyology, American Museum of Natural History, New York], in the preface to W. R. Bird, The Origin of Species Revisited, Vol. 1, page xii (Nashville TN: Regency, 1991).) Big Bang "What we have found is evidence for the birth of the universe ... it's like looking at God." (George Smoots, [Nobel prizewinner in physics and Director of the COBE Project at Berkeley], in Thomas H. Maugh II, "Relics of 'Big Bang' Seen for First Time," Los Angeles Times, pages A1, A30 (Friday, April 24, 1992).) "The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy ... For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries." (Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, page 116 (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978).) “Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on Earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover.” (Robert Jastrow, [in keynote address for 1977 symposium of the AAAS, entitled "God and the Astronomers, which later became a book of the same name], as quoted by B. Durbin, “A Scientist Caught Between Two Faiths: Interview with Robert Jastrow,” Christianity Today, Vol. 26, page 15 (August 6, 1982).) "The Big Bang cooled just quickly enough to allow neutrons to become bound to protons inside atoms. Here the presence of electrons and the Pauli principle discouraged their decay, but even that would not prevent it were the mass difference slightly greater. And were it smaller--one third of what it is--then neutrons outside atoms would not decay. All protons would thus change irreversibly into neutrons during the Bang, whose violence produced frequent proton-to-neutron conversions. There could be no atoms: the universe would be neutron stars and black holes ... The mass of the electron enters the picture like this. If the neutron mass failed to exceed the proton mass by a little more than the electron mass then atoms would collapse, their electrons combining with their protons to yield neutrons ... As things are, the neutron is just enough heavier to ensure that the Bang yielded only about one neutron to every seven protons. The excess protons were available for making hydrogen of long-lived stable stars, water, and carbohydrates." (John Leslie, Universes, page 40 (London: Routledge, 1989).) ---."Those seeking evidence of fine tuning may appear to have embarrassingly much at which they can point. A force strength or a particle mass often seems to need to be more or else exactly what it is not just for one reason, but for two or three or five. Yet obviously, it could not be tuned in first one way and then another to satisfy several conflicting requirements. A force strength or a mass cannot take several values at once! ... One possible response would be that when factor A looks as if it needed find tuning in order to bring it into life-generating harmony first with factor B, then with factor C, and then with D, and so on, what really occurred was the reverse. It was factors B, C, and D which were all of them fine-tuned so as to be harmonized with A. My hunch is that while such a response has some force, we should find ourselves under pressure to say the same kind of thing about factor B as well--but that would lead to inconsistency." (pages 64-65.) ---."Contemporary religious thinkers often approach the Argument from Design with a grim determination that their churches shall not again be made to look foolish. Recalling what happened when churchmen opposed first Galileo and then Darwin, they insist that religion must be based not on science but on faith. Philosophy, they announce, has demonstrated that Design Arguments lack all force. I hope to have shown that philosophy has demonstrated no such thing. Our universe, which these religious thinkers believe to be created by God, does look, greatly though this may dismay them, very much as if created by God." (page 22.) "The scientific community is prepared to consider the idea God created the universe a more respectable hypothesis today than at any time in the last 100 years" (Frederic B. Burnham, [science historian], in David Briggs, "Science, Religion, Are Discovering Commonality in Big Bang Theory," Los Angeles Times, pages B6, B7 (Saturday, May 2, 1992).) "Given a random distribution of (gravitating) matter, it is overwhelmingly more probable that it will form a black hole rather than a star or cloud of dispersed gas. These considerations give a new slant, therefore, to the question of whether the universe was created in an ordered or disordered state. If the initial state were chosen at random, it seems exceedingly probable that the big bang would have coughed out black holes rather than dispersed gases. The present arrangement of matter and energy, with matter spread thinly at relatively low density, in the form of stars and gas clouds would, apparently, only result from a very special choice of initial conditions. Roger Penrose has computed the odds against the observed universe appearing by accident, given that a black hole cosmos is so much more likely on a priori grounds. He estimates a figure of 10^300 to one." (Paul Davies, God and the New Physics, pages 178-179 (Simon & Schuster, 1984).) "We have attempted to describe early stages of the expansion of the universe but the description in terms of nuclear physics and relativity is not an explanation of those conditions. Formidable questions arise and it is not clear today where the answers should be sought: indeed, even the scientific description of these queries produces the remarkable idea that there may not be a solution in the language of science. Why is the universe expanding? Furthermore, why is it expanding at so near the critical rate to prevent its collapse? The query is most important because minor differences near time zero would have made human existence impossible. When the universe was one second from the beginning of the expansion we have stated that the temperature had fallen to 1010 deg K and the density to 1 gram per cubic centimeter. It is a phase when, it is postulated, the universe had already reached the possibility of description in terms of common physical concepts. If at that moment the rate of expansion had been reduced by only one part in a thousand billion, then the universe would have collapsed after a few million years, near the end of the epoch we now recognize as the radiation era, or the primordial fireball, before matter and radiation had become decoupled. This remarkable fact was pointed out recently by one of the most distinguished contemporary cosmologists who referred to the suggestions that out of all the possible universes, the only one which can exist, in the sense that it can be known, is simply the one which satisfies the narrow conditions necessary for the development of intelligent life." (Bernard Lovell, In the Center of Immensities, pages 122-123 (New York: Harper & Row, 1978).) "It is the discovery of the century if not of all time." (Stephen Hawking, quoted by Thomas H. Maugh II in "Big-Bang Discovery Makes a Star Out of Astrophysicist Cosmology: 'It is the discovery of the century, if not of all time,' says Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University," Los Angeles Times, (May 10, 1992).) "It is the most exciting thing that has happened in my life as a cosmologist." (Carlos Frenk, [Durbin University], in Nigel Hawkes, "Hunt On for Dark Secret of Universe," London Times, page 1 (April 25, 1992).) "Unbelievably important... The significance of this cannot be overstated. They have found the Holy Grail of cosmology." (Michael Turner, [University of Chicago], in Associated Press, "U.S. Scientists Find a 'Holy Grail': Ripples at Edge of the Universe," London International Herald Tribune, (Friday, April 24, 1992).) "Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant . . . I should like to find a genuine loophole." (Sir Arthur S. Eddington, "The End of the World: from the Standpoint of Mathematical Physics,” Nature, Vol. 127, page 450 (March 21, 1931).) "Similarly the theory recently suggested by Einstein and de Sitter, that in the beginning all the matter created was projected with a radial motion so as to disperse even faster than the present rate of dispersal of the galaxies, leaves me cold. One cannot deny the possibility, but it is difficult to see what mental satisfaction such a theory is supposed to afford. Since I cannot avoid introducing this question of a beginning, it has seemed to me that the most satisfactory theory would be one which made the beginning not too unaesthetically abrupt." (Sir Arthur S. Eddington, The Expanding Universe, page 58 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1940).) --."The test of extrapolation to the most distant future does not, I think, disclose any definite weakness in the present system of science-in particular, in the second law of thermodynamics on which physical science so largely relies. It is true that the extrapolation foretells that the material universe will some day arrive at a state of dead sameness and so virtually come to an end, to my mind that is a rather happy avoidance of a nightmare of eternal repetition. It is the opposite extrapolation towards the past which gives real cause to suspect a weakness in the present conceptions of science. The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural. We may have to let it go at that." (page 117.) "The biggest problem with the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe is philosophical-perhaps even theological-what was there before the bang? This problem alone was sufficient to give a great impetus to the Steady State theory; but with that theory now sadly in conflict with the observations, the best way around this initial difficulty is provided by a model in which the universe expands from a singularity, collapses back again, and repeats the cycle indefinitely." (John Gribbin, "Oscillating Universe Bounces Back," Nature, Vol. 259, pages 15, 16 (1976.) "For myself, faith begins with the realization that a supreme intelligence brought the universe into being and created man. It is not difficult for me to have this faith, for it is incontrovertible that where there is a plan there is intelligence--an orderly, unfolding universe testifies to the truth of the most majestic statement ever uttered--'In the beginning God.'" (Arthur Compton, [1927 Nobel prizewinner in Physics], Chicago Daily News (April 12, 1936).) "Notoriously, confession is good for the soul. I will therefore begin by confessing that the Stratonician atheist has to be embarrassed by the contemporary cosmological consensus (Big Bang). For it seems that the cosmologists are providing a scientific proof ... that the universe had a beginning." (Henry Margenau and Roy A. Vargesse, Cosmos, Bios, Theos, page 241 (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1992).) "What exactly is he discussing here? I think it is cosmology: "I think we need to go further than this and admit that the only acceptable explanation is creation. I know this is an anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it." (H. S. Lipson, [Professor of Physics, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, UK], "A physicist looks at evolution," Physics Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 4, page 138 (May 1980).) "So I conjectured that our universe had its physical origin as a quantum fluctuation from some pre-existing... state of nothingness." (E. P. Tryon, "What Made the World?" New Scientist, Vol. 101: 14, page 15 (March 8, 1984).) "It is a bit like the well-known horde of monkeys hammering away on typewriters-most of what they write will be garbage, but very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of Shakespeare's sonnets." (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, page 130 (London: Bantam, 1988, reprinted 1991).) Anthropic Principle / Fine Tuning "But while he pursues the truth, what do Stootman's instincts tell him? What is the gut feeling of the man in charge of Australia's search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? `I'd probably come down on the more negative side ... I think it's unlikely. But that doesn't stop the quest for something from being rigorously pursued and investigated. "The irony of the whole wretched thing is this: In the SETI quest we are looking for evidence of something that is artificial - a signal. Yet when we look at the natural world, we won't accept that the engineering that's there, and the information that's there in the universe, is artificial.'" (Linnell G., "Heaven Only Knows", The Bulletin, Vol. 117, No. 6181, July 6, 1999, p.34) "Nature has evidently picked the values of the fundamental constants in such a way that typical stars lie very close indeed to the boundary of convective instability … If gravity were very slightly weaker, or electromagnetism very slightly stronger (or the electron slightly less massive relative to the proton), all stars would be red dwarfs. A correspondingly tiny change the other way, and they would all be blue giants … a star's convection plays an important role in planetary formation, so that w world where gravity was very slightly less weak might have no planets. In either case, weaker or stronger, the nature of the universe would be radically different" "It is hard to resist the impression of something - some influence capable of transcending spacetime and the confinements of relativistic causality - possessing an overview of the entire cosmos at the instant of its creation, and manipulating all the causally disconnected parts to go bang with almost exactly the same vigour at the same time, and yet not so exactly Coordinated as to preclude the small scale, slight irregularities that eventually formed the galaxies, and us." (Paul Davies, the Accidental Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 73) "It is hard to resist the impression that the present structure of the universe, apparently so sensitive to minor alterations in the numbers, has been rather carefully thought out... The seeming miraculous concurrence of numerical values that nature has assigned to her fundamental constants must remain the most compelling evidence for an element of cosmic design." (Paul Davies. God and the New Physics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983, p. 189) "Taken together they [lists of design evidences] provide impressive evidence that life as we know it depends very sensitively on the form of the laws of physics, and on some seemingly fortuitous accidents in the actual values that nature has chosen for various particle masses, force strengths, and so on. If we could play God, and select values for these natural quantities at whim by twiddling a set of knobs, we would find that almost all knob settings would render the universe uninhabitable. Some knobs would have to be fine-tuned to enormous precision if life is to flourish in the universe" (Paul Davies, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Science", in John Marks Templeton, Evidence of Purpose (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1996), p. 46.) "There are many peculiar aspects of the laws of nature that, had they been slightly different, would have precluded the existence of life." (Physicist Paul Davies, The Guardian, January 23, 2003) "This fine-tuning has two possible explanations. Either the Universe was designed specifically for us by a creator or there is a multitude of universes- a `multiverse'." (Chown, Marcus [Science Editor, New Scientist], "Anything Goes," New Scientist, 6 June 1998, Vol. 158, No. 2137, p.28) "The multiverse explanation for the apparently contrived ingenuity of the universe suffers from a number of problems. In most versions, the existence of the other universes cannot be verified or falsified, so its status as a scientific theory is questionable. Second, if the bio-friendliness of the natural world were the result of randomness, we might expect the observed universe to be minimally rather than optimally bio-friendly. But the degree of bio-friendliness we observe in the universe is far in excess of what is needed to give rise to a few observers to act as cosmic selectors." (Physicist Paul Davies, The Guardian, January 23, 2003) "There is only one actual universe, with a unique set of basic materials and physical constants, and it is therefore surprising that the elements of this unique set-up are just right for life when they might easily have been wrong. This is not made less surprising by the fact that if it had not been so, no one would have been here to be surprised. We can properly envision and consider alternative possibilities which do not include our being there to experience them." (J.L. Mackie, atheist, in Miracle of Theism, p.141) "If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you would have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just about where these levels are actually found to be ... A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question." (Hoyle F., 'The Universe: Some Past and Present Reflections," University of Cardiff, 1982, p16, in Davies P.C.W., "The Accidental Universe," [1982], Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1983, reprint, p.118) "Cover the entire North American continent in dimes all the way up to the moon, a height of about 239,000 miles. (In comparison, the money to pay for the U.S. federal government debt would cover one square mile less than two feet deep with dimes.) Next, pile dimes from here to the moon on a billion other continents the same size as North America. Paint one dime red and mix it into the billion piles of dimes. Blindfold a friend and ask him to pick out one dime. The odds that he will pick the red dime are one in 1037. And this is only one of the parameters that is so delicately balanced to allow life to form." (Hugh Ross, "The Creator and the Cosmos", pg. 115) "As you tune you radio, there are certain frequencies where the circuit has just the right resonance and you lock onto a station. The internal structure of an atomic nucleus is something like that, with specific energy or resonance levels. If two nuclear fragments collide with a resulting energy that just matches a resonance level, they will tend to stick and form a stable nucleus. Behold! Cosmic alchemy will occur! In the carbon atom, the resonance just happens to match the combined energy of the beryllium atom and a colliding helium nucleus. Without it, there would be relatively few carbon atoms. Similarly, the internal details of the oxygen nucleus play a critical role. Oxygen can be formed by combining helium and carbon nuclei, but the corresponding resonance level in the oxygen nucleus is half a percent too low for the combination to stay together easily. Had the resonance level in the carbon been 4 percent lower, there would be essentially no carbon. Had that level in the oxygen been only half a percent higher, virtually all the carbon would have been converted to oxygen. Without that carbon abundance, neither you nor I would be here." (Hugh Ross, Beyond the Cosmos (Colorado Springs, Colo.: NavPress Publishing Group, 1996), pg. 32) "The Cosmic Designer Hypothesis is one way of explaining the improbable fine-tuning of nature's laws. And compared with the Big Fluke Hypothesis (which is really no explanation at all), it may not look so bad. But those who find its deistic flavor unpalatable have suggested a third option: the Many Universes Hypothesis. ... At first blush, the Many Universes Hypothesis would appear rather extravagant, requiring a huge (perhaps infinite) number of additional universes merely to account for some features of our own. The Cosmic Designer Hypothesis looks downright economical by comparison. Since these extra universes are cut off from our own in space and time, and are thus unobservable, they would seem to offend against the principle that our theories of the world should posit no more entities than needed. Shouldn't these universes be shaved away by Occam's razor?" ("War of the Worlds: Do you believe in God? Or in multiple universes?" Lingua Franca, December 2000/January 2001) "Consequently, the density of the universe immediately after the Big Bang must have been equal to the critical density to an incredibly high order of precision. Calculations demonstrate that, in order for the rate of deceleration to be roughly 1 today, the value of P right after the Big Bang must have been equal to Pc to more than 50 decimal places! What could have happened immediately after the Planck time to ensure that P=Pc to such an astounding degree of accuracy?" (William Kaufmann III, Universe, 3rd edition (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1991), pg. 582) "In the first three minutes of cosmic history, the whole universe was the arena of nuclear reactions. When that era came to an end, through the cooling produced by expansion, the world was left, as it is today on the large scale, a mixture of three-quarters hydrogen and one-quarter helium. A little change in the balance between the strong and weak nuclear forces could have resulted in there being no hydrogen--and so ultimately no water, that fluid that seems so essential to life. A small increase (about 2 percent) in the strong nuclear force would bind two protons to form diprotons. There would then be no hydrogen-burning main-sequence stars, but only helium burners, which are far too fierce and rapid to be energy sources capable of sustaining the coming to be of planetary life. A decrease in the strong nuclear force by a similar amount would have unbound the deuteron and played havoc with fruitful nuclear physics." (John Polkinghorne, "A Potent Universe," in Templeton, pg. 111) "Slight variations in physical laws such as gravity or electromagnetism would make life impossible . . . the necessity to produce lifelies at the center of the universe's whole machinery and design ..." (John Wheeler, Princeton University professor of physics Reader's Digest, Sept., 1986) "It was not for some time that I was able to place my finger on the source of my discomfort. It arises, I understand now, because the contention that we owe our existence to a stupendous series of coincidences strikes a responsive chord. That contention is far too close for comfort to notions such as: We are the center of the universe. God loves mankind more than all other creatures. The cosmos is watching over us. The universe has a plan; we are essential to that plan." (Greenstein, George [Professor of Astronomy, Amherst College, USA]., "The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos", William Morrow & Co: New York NY, 1988, pp.25-26) "As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency-or, rather, Agency-must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit? Do we not see in its harmony, a harmony so perfectly fitted to our needs, evidence of what one religious writer has called "a preserving, a continuing, an intending mind, a Wisdom, Power and Goodness far exceeding the limits of our thoughts?" A heady prospect. Unfortunately I believe it to be illusory. As I claim mankind is not the center of the universe, as I claim anthropism to be different from anthropocentrism, so too I believe that the discoveries of science are not capable of proving God's existence-not now, not ever. And more than that: I also believe that reference to God will never suffice to explain a single one of these discoveries. God is not an explanation." (Greenstein, George [Professor of Astronomy, Amherst College, USA]., "The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos," William Morrow & Co: New York NY, 1988, pp.27-28...well, if he refuses to accept God as an explanatory cause, its his loss.) "It turns out that the physical constants have just the values required to ensure that the Universe contains stars with planets capable of supporting intelligent life...The simplest interpretation is that the Universe was designed by a creator who intended that intelligent life should evolve. This interpretation lies outside science." (Maynard Smith, John [Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex] & Szathmary, Eors [Institute for Advanced Study, Budapest], "On the likelihood of habitable worlds," Nature, Vol. 384, 14 November 1996, p.107) "Removing the moon seems harmless enough at first. Of course, Solon [Earth without the moon] would differ from the earth. The tides would be lower without the moon, and it would lack eclipses and romantic, moonlit nights, but in the global scheme of things these changes seem trivial. As we dig deeper, we discover that lower tides, higher winds, and shorter days would greatly affect Solon's geography, its ability to evolve life, and the quality of the life animals would have there. As the differences between Earth and Solon become more evident, it becomes clear that Solon would be a much less hospitable place in which to live. There is much more that could be said about Solon, but this chapter raises a broader question that cries out for consideration. That is, just how ideal a planet did we inherit compared with the one we might have gotten? Are we living on the best of all possible worlds?" (Comins N.E., "What If the Moon Didn't Exist?: Voyages to Earths That Might Have Been," HarperCollins: New York NY, 1993, p.48) "Water is actually one of the strangest substances known to science. This may seem a rather odd thing to say about a substance as familiar but it is surely true. Its specific heat, its surface tension, and most of its other physical properties have values anomalously higher or lower than those of any other known material. The fact that its solid phase is less dense than its liquid phase (ice floats) is virtually a unique property. These aspects or the chemical and physical structure of water have been noted before, for instance by the authors of the Bridgewater Treatises in the 1830's and by Henderson in 1913, who also pointed out that these strange properties make water a uniquely useful liquid and the basis for living things." "The anomalous melting points, boiling points and heats of vaporization of water relative to those of other substances are seen most clearly if the values of these quantities are graphed as a function of atomic weight or atomic number. Figure 8.4 gives the melting points of various hydride molecules as a function of the location in the periodic table of the largest atom in the molecule. Figure 8.5 gives the boiling points and Figure 8.6 the heats of vaporization of various hydrides as a function of location in the periodic table. These figures show clearly that if the elements in the first row of the periodic table are ignored, the melting points, the boiling points, and the heats of vaporization all increase with the atomic weight of R for a series of compounds RHn, where n is constant for a given series. In the RH4 series, the values of these three quantities all lie more or less on a straight line. In particular, the values for methane, CH4, are those which one would have obtained by extrapolating backward along the RH4 series. The values for water [H20], hydrogen fluoride [HF], and ammonia [NH3] are far in excess of what one would expect by linear extrapolation. The boiling point of water, for instance, would be expected to occur at 100oC, rather than the +100oC that is observed. This indicates that there is a very strong force acting between the molecules of water, a force which is absent, or almost so, in the interactions of other members of the RH2 series. These properties of water can be understood in terms of the atomic structure of the water molecule ..." (Barrow J.D. & Tipler F.J., "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle," 1996, reprint, pp.524, 525- 526) "polarity of the water molecule if greater: heat of fusion and vaporization would be too great for life to exist if smaller: heat of fusion and vaporization would be too small for life's existence; liquid water would become too inferior a solvent for life chemistry to proceed; ice would not float, leading to a runaway freeze-up" (Ross H.N., "The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Greatest Scientific Discoveries of the Century Reveal God," [1993], NavPress: Colorado Springs CO, 1994, Third Printing, pp.112-113) "One cannot be exposed to the law and order of the universe without concluding that there must be design and purpose behind it all....The better we understand the intricacies of the universe and all it harbors, the more reason we have found to marvel at the inherent design upon which it is based." (Werner von Braun, one of the world's first and foremost rocket engineers and a leading authority on space travel) "[T]hough these bodies may, indeed, continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws ... [Thus] [t]his most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." (Sir Isaac Newton, Newton's Principia Motte's Translation Revised (543-44), (Andrew Motte Trans. & Florian Cajori rev. 1934), 1686) “It would be very foolish to throw away the right answer on the basis that it doesn’t conform to some criteria for what is or isn’t science.” (LEONARD SUSSKIND (quoted in Our Universe: Outrageous fortune Geoff Brumfiel Nature, Jan 5th, 2006) "The more scientists testily insisted that the big bang was unfathomable, the more they sounded like medieval priests saying, "Don't ask me what made God." Researchers, prominently Alan Guth of MIT, began to assert that the big bang could be believed only if its mechanics could be explained. Indeed, Guth went on to propose such an explanation. Suffice it to say that, while Guth asserts science will eventually figure out the cause, he still invokes unknown physical laws in the prior condition. And no matter how you slice it, calling on unknown physical laws sounds awfully like appealing to the supernatural." (Wired Magazine, December 2002, The New Convergence, By Gregg Easterbrook, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/convergence_pr.htm)l “Intelligent design, as one sees it from a scientific point of view, seems to be quite real. This is a very special universe: it's remarkable that it came out just this way. If the laws of physics weren't just the way they are, we couldn't be here at all. The sun couldn't be there, the laws of gravity and nuclear laws and magnetic theory, quantum mechanics, and so on have to be just the way they are for us to be here. Some scientists argue that "well, there's an enormous number of universes and each one is a little different. This one just happened to turn out right." Well, that's a postulate, and it's a pretty fantastic postulate — it assumes there really are an enormous number of universes and that the laws could be different for each of them. The other possibility is that ours was planned, and that's why it has come out so specially.” (http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/06/17_townes.shtml, 'Explore as much as we can': Nobel Prize winner Charles Townes on evolution, intelligent design, and the meaning of life, By Bonnie Azab Powell, UC Berkeley NewsCenter | 17 June 2005) "God did create the universe about 13.7 billion years ago, and of necessity has involved Himself with His creation ever since. The purpose of this universe is something that only God knows for sure, but it is increasingly clear to modern science that the universe was exquisitely fine-tuned to enable human life." (http://www.hope.edu/2005/10/29/remarks-richard-smalley-2005-alumni-banquet, Remarks by Richard Smalley at 2005 Alumni Banquet Submitted by Karen Bos on Sat, 2005-10-29 11:43 ) “The numerical values that nature has assigned to the fundamental constants, such as the charge on the electron, the mass of the proton, and the Newtonian gravitational constant, may be mysterious, but they are crucially relevant to the structure of the universe that we perceive. As more and more physical systems, from nuclei to galaxies, have become better understood, scientists have begun to realise that many characteristics of these systems are remarkably sensitive to the precise values of the universal constants. Had nature opted for a slightly different set of numbers, the world would be a very different place. Probably we would not be here to see it. More intriguing still, certain structures, such as solar-type stars, depend for their characteristic features on wildly improbable numerical accidents that combine together fundamental constants from distinct branches of physics. And when one goes on to study cosmology – the overall structure and evolution of the universe – incredulity mounts. Recent discoveries about the primeval cosmos oblige us to accept that the expanding universe has been set up in its motion with a cooperation of astonishing precision.” (Paul C W Davies, in ‘The Accidental Universe’, 1982, Cambridge University Press) “Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan.” (Arno Penzias) Source: Many of the quotes in our collection have been verified for accuracy, but not all have been verified. Thus, we present our quote-collections as a starting point for research, and suggest you verify any individual quote before using it. If you have information about problems or inaccuracies in any quotes, we welcome corrections. Please send them to us at: info@ideacenter.org. Return to the Quote Collections Home Page. |
