God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

“Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence.”

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”

“God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not to be understood merely as a God of the gaps, he is the ground of all explanation: it is his existence which gives rise to the very possibility of explanation, scientific or otherwise. It is important to stress this because influential authors such as Richard Dawkins will insist on conceiving of God as an explanatory alternative to science – an idea that is nowhere to be found in theological reflection of any depth. Dawkins is therefore tilting at a windmill - dismissing a concept of God that no serious thinker believes in anyway. Such activity is not necessarily to be regarded as a mark of intellectual sophistication.”

“In China we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America you can criticize the government, but not Darwin.”

“God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence – why there is something rather than nothing.”

“The world of strict naturalism in which clever mathematical laws all by themselves bring the universe and life into existence, is pure (and, one might add, poor) fiction. To call it science-fiction would besmirch the name of science.”

“To the majority of those who have reflected deeply and written about the origin and nature of the universe, it has seemed that it points beyond itself to a source which is non-physical and of great intelligence and power.”

“For, the statement that only science can lead to truth is not itself deduced from science. It is not a scientific statement but rather a statement about science, that is, it is a metascientific statement. Therefore, if scientism’s basic principle is true, the statement expressing scientism must be false. Scientism refutes itself. Hence it is incoherent.”

“But that does not alter the fact that mainstream Christianity will insist that faith and evidence are inseparable. Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence.”

“It is rather ironical that in the sixteenth century some people resisted advances in science because they seemed to threaten belief in God; whereas in the twentieth century scientific ideas of a beginning have been resisted because they threatened to increase the plausibility of belief in God.”

“Evreni işleten mekanizmalarla onu var eden ya da idame ettiren sebebi birbirine karıştırmamalıyız”

“I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate… We are truly meant to be here.”

“To postulate a trillion-trillion other universes, rather than one God, in order to explain the orderliness of our universe, seems the height of irrationality.”

“But in some quarters the very success of science has also led to the idea that, because we can understand the mechanisms of the universe without bringing in God, we can safely conclude that there was no God who designed and created the universe in the first place.”

“Darwin'in ifadesiyle:"O korkunç şüpheyi her zaman yaşarım: Daha düşük seviyedeki hayvan zihinlerinden gelişen insan zihninin hükümlerinin herhangi bir değeri var mıdır ve ya güvenilir midir diye”

“Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.’ It was this conviction that led Francis Bacon (1561–1626), regarded by many as the father of modern science, to teach that God has provided us with two books – the book of Nature and the Bible –”

“Tabii ki Tanrı, Laplace'nin (eşyanın nasıl işlediğine dair) matematiksel tarifinde yer almaz, tıpkı Bay Ford'un içten yanmalı motorun bilimsel tarifinde yer almadığı gibi.”

“If life is the result of a purely naturalistic process, what then of morality? Has it, too, evolved? And if so, of what significance are our concepts of right and wrong, justice and truth?”

“Evren, serinkanlılığımızı koruyamayacağımız kadar büyüleyici.”

“When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the universal law of gravitation he did not say, ‘I have discovered a mechanism that accounts for planetary motion, therefore there is no agent God who designed it.’ Quite the opposite: precisely because he understood how it worked, he was moved to increased admiration for the God who had designed it that way.”

“The existence of laws of physics... strongly implies that there is a God who formulates such laws and ensures that the physical realm conforms to them.”

“The more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator God, who designed the universe for a purpose, gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”

“Evrim bir biyolojik mekanizma anlamına gelir ama Tanrı'ya inananlar Tanrı'yı, diğer şeylerin yanında, mekanizmaları tasarlayan ve yaratan bir Zat olarak kabul ederler. Daha önce, Ford arabanın çalışma mekanizmasını anlamanın Bay Ford'u yok kabul etmeye bir kanıt oluşturmadığını görmüştük. Dolayısıyla bir mekanizmanın varlığı o mekanizmayı tasarlayan bir öznenin olmadığını göstermez.”

“Johannes Kepler described his motivation thus: ‘The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”

“Far from science abolishing God, it would seem that there is a substantial case for asserting that it is the existence of a Creator that gives to science its fundamental intellectual justification.”

“The teaching of morality likewise lies outside science. Science can tell you that, if you add strychnine to someone’s drink, it will kill them. But science cannot tell you whether it is morally right or wrong to put strychnine into your grandmother’s tea so that you can get your hands on her property.”

“the laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics’ and that the ‘human mind is a work of God and one of the most excellent’.”

“Richard Feynman emphasized that one should always be careful to record all the evidence against one’s theories; indeed, one should bend over backwards to consider it, since the easiest person to fool is oneself.”

“I am not postulating a “God of the gaps”, a god merely to explain the things that science has not yet explained. I am postulating a God to explain why science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains.’ Richard Swinburne”

“The very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause for that order.’ Swinburne is using inference to the best explanation and saying that God is the best explanation for the explanatory power of science.”