science and religion on Natural Laws

To know the mighty works of God, to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful workings of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of...

When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the centr...

It is evident that an acquaintance with natural laws means no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed.

In a quiet hospital room in North Carolina, an eager young doctor with a bright future evaluates his elderly patient with not much future left at all. She has a terminal heart condition, inoperable. A...

Those laws are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts… and if piety allow us to say so, our u...

People take it for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. The underlying order in nature-the laws of physics-are simply accepted as given, as brute facts. Nobody asks where ...

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 ...

Let science extend the domain of actual knowledge, and lay bare as it may the secrets of the material world. It only exposes more and more the proportions of the great cathedral, and shows us the lamp...

Scientist John Haldane once proposed to the English priest Ronald Knox that, given the vast number of planets in the universe, the emergence of life by sheer chance was inevitable. Knox responded with...

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being...This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the...

I have concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence. Believe me, everything that we call chance today won’t make sense anymore. To me it is clear that we exist in a plan w...

God created everything by number, weight and measure.

The current understanding of the physical sciences, which contrasts sharply with the strictly mechanical perspectives prevalent in earlier centuries, aligns closely with the New Testament’s portrayal ...

He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God's providence to lead him aright.

I believe that a full understanding of this remarkable human capacity for scientific discovery ultimately requires the insight that our power in this respect is the gift of the universe’s Creator who,...

We all know that there are regions of the human spirit untrammeled by the world of physics. In the mystic sense of the creation around us, in the expression of art, in a yearning towards God, the soul...

When the renowned French mathematician and astronomer Pierre Simon de Laplace presented Emperor Napoleon with a copy of his book on celestial mechanics, the emperor asked where God’s place was in his ...

If we accept Genesis 1 as ancient cosmology, then we need to interpret it as ancient cosmology rather than translate it into modern cosmology. If we try to turn it into modern cosmology, we are making...

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 the seeds of ...

God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called creation.

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 extinguish...

* This story is debated among Galileo scholars, though most would agree that the story conveys Galileo’s unique approach to learning. Galileo Galilei was a man who dared to look beyond what othe...

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 extinct...

Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.

The atheist author Richard Dawkins, who wrote, “The universe, at the bottom, has no design, no purpose, no evil, and no other good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor care...

Many of the modern controversies surrounding the Bible—for example, human sexuality, creationism and the “openness” of God—revolve around questions concerning hermeneutics. The science of hermeneutics...

There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other. Every serious and reflective person realizes, I think, that the religious element in hi...

Galileo Gallilei was a remarkable individual with a variety of talents, which he utilized effectively throughout his life. One day, while observing a swinging lamp in the cathedral at Pisa, he made a ...

The impossibility of real science and real religion ever conflicting becomes evident when one examines the purpose of science and the purpose of religion. The purpose of science is to develop – withou...

The first important quarrel of this sort arose over the advancing by Copernicus of his theory that the earth, instead of being a flat plane and the center of the universe, was actually only one of a n...