Faith and Science QuotesThe following
quotes have been gleaned from the reading done by the members of
the ELCA Alliance for Faith,
Science and Technology. Some, due to their length, do not
appear as a "Quote of the Week" but are offered here for your
reading pleasure.
If you know of a good
quotation to add to this list and to be used on the FST
home page's Quote of the Week,
please let us
know!
True religion is real living;
living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and
righteousness.
Albert Einstein
Science without religion is
lame, religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein
Much of the conflict between
science and religion [in the time of Galileo] turns out to have
been a conflict between new science and the sanctified science
of the previous generation.
John Hedley Brooke
We don't know how large a
proportion of the significant evidence about the universe is
excluded by science. Perhaps hardly any. Perhaps so great a
proportion that any body of knowledge which excludes it is
hardly more than a caricature. Perhaps something in between — so
that science finds truth but not the whole truth.
Kitty Ferguson
When the solution is simple,
God is answering.
Albert Einstein
I have always thought it
curious that, while most scientists claim to eschew religion, it
actually dominates their thoughts more than it does the clergy.
Fred Hoyle
What one must not do is to
rule out the supernatural as the one impossible explanation.
C.S. Lewis
Science tells us how the
heavens go. Religion tells us how to go to heaven.
Galileo Galilei
I want to know God's thoughts
… the rest are details.
Albert Einstein
It ill becomes any of us to
take the attitude that all evidence for God is false evidence,
beneath consideration, simply by virtue of its being evidence
for God, or even by virtue of its being outside the purview of
science.
Kitty Ferguson
I believe in the [ancient]
covenant. It is true that we emerged in the universe by chance,
but the idea of chance is itself only a cover for our ignorance.
I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine
the universe and the details of its architecture, the more
evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known
that we were coming.
Freeman Dyson
Augustine said that we were
all born into the world of “common grace” [i.e., available to
all]. Before one is baptized, or even if one never is, such
grace meets one in God's creation. There is grace in the pear
tree that blooms and blushes. There is common grace in the sea
(that massive cleanliness which we are proceeding to corrupt),
in the fact that there was, before we laid hands on it, clean
air. Our task is to appreciate that grace.
Joseph Sittler
Talking through tough social
issues — such as cloning — as Lutherans, as Christians, as
church, means respectful, yet zealous dialogue rooted in shared
faith. God is active in all realms of life - the scientific, the
social, the political. God cares for creation, orders society,
seeks justice, and draws us out of our individual lives to
engage the world.
Margaret McLean
On the first page of the
Bible there is an instance of how literalism is but an
invitation to transcend the image to which literalism points.
That first page is not geology, biology or paleontology; it is
high religion. For there we are told who we are in terms of our
constititutive text. And if we could understand that, we would
worrying about whether the antelopes or the cantaloupes came in
a certain order.
Joseph Sittler
We should take care not to
make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles,
but no personality.
Albert Einstein
The Lord God is subtle, but
malicious he is not.
Albert Einstein
God does not play dice.
Albert Einstein
Stop telling God what he can
do.
Niels Bohr
In a chaotic universe, God
fits naturally into the role of riverboat gambler.
Joseph Ford
A completed book exists in
its entirety, although we humans read it in a time sequence from
the beginning to the end. Just as an author does not write the
first chapter, and then leave the others to write themselves, So
God's creativity is not to seem as uniquely confined to, or even
especially invested in, the event of the Big Bang. Rather his
creativity has been seen as permeating equally all space and all
time: his role as Creator and Sustainer merge.
Russell Stannard
The Senegalese
conservationist Baba Dioum can summarize: “In the end, we will
conserve only what we love, we will love only what we
understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”
Ursula Goodenough
Theology differs from science
in many respects, because of its different subject matter, a
personal God who cannot be put to the test in the way that the
impersonal physical world can be subjected to experimental
enquiry. Yet science and theology have this in common, that each
can be, and should be defended as being investigations of what
is, the search for increasing verisimilitude in our
understanding of reality.
John Polkinghorne
Since as the Creation is, so
is the Creator also magnified, we may conclude in consequence of
an infinity, and an infinite all-active power, that as the
visible creation is supposed to be full of sidereal systems and
planetary worlds, so … the endless immensity is an unlimited
plenum of creations, not unlike the known universe.
Thomas Wright
Natural history is not taught
in seminary. This is curious, as most people in pastoral
ministry are about 567 times more likely to be asked about
cosmology or sub-nuclear physics or human biology or evolution
than they are to be asked about irregular Greek verbs or the
danger of the patripassionist heresy. If we monotheists are
going to go around claiming that our “God made the heaven and
the earth,” it is not unreasonable to expect us to know
something about what that heaven and earth actually are.
Sarah Maitland
[Georg Cantor was the first
to prove that there could be a series of infinities; that
infinities come in an infinite number of sizes.] Thus Cantor's
Absolute is a perfect image for what we experience of God. When
I speak of a Big Enough God I am not merely thinking of an
Infinite God, but the God of infinities, the Absolute, which
either chooses to reveal itself or remains veiled in mystery.
Modern mathematics does begin to feel like the language that God
talks.
Sara Maitland
The highest principles for
our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the
Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal
which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very
inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our
aspirations and valuations. If one were to take that goal out of
out of its religious form and look merely at its purely human
side, one might state it perhaps thus: free and responsible
development of the individual, so that he may place his powers
freely and gladly in the service of all mankind . . . it is only
to the individual that a soul is given. And the high destiny of
the individual is to serve rather than to rule, or to impose
himself in any other way.
Albert Einstein
Wilberforce did not believe
in either evolution or extinction.
Owen believed in extinction but not evolution.
Lamarck believed in evolution but not extinction.
Darwin believed in evolution and extinction.
All four of them believed in God.
Sara Maitland
Let us now speak according to
natural lights. If there is a God, He is infinitely
incomprehensible. . . . We are then incapable of knowing of
either what He is or if He is. . . .
Blaise Pascal
It is certain that those who
have the living faith in their hearts see at once that all
existence is none other than the work of the God whom they
adore. But for those in whom this light is extinguished, [if we
were to show them our proofs of the existence of God] nothing is
more calculated to arouse their contempt. . . .
Blaise Pascal
The heart has its reasons,
which reason does not know.
Blaise Pascal
Intelligence makes clear to
us the interrelationship of means and ends. But mere thinking
cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To
make clear these fundamental ends and valuations and to set them
fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me
precisely the most important function which religion has to form
in the social life of man.
Albert Einstein
All religions, arts and
sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations
are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the
sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual
towards freedom.
Albert Einstein
The finest emotion of which
we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of
all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is
alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a
state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable
for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom
and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are
intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this
feeling . . . that is the core of the true religious sentiment.
In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among
profoundly religious men.
Albert Einstein
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