science on Chance

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...

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...

This paragraph from the scientist and atheist David Friend provides a stark contrast to a Christian conception of life, humanity, and the world we inhabit: We are here because one odd group of fishe...

To get a sense of how breathing is regarded by modern medical professionals, think back to your last check-up. Chances are your doctor took your blood pressure, pulse, and temperature, then placed a s...

Have you ever heard of the forensic science theory known as Locard’s Exchange Principle? Named after the "Sherlock Holmes of France," the French criminologist Emile Locard, this theory sugge...

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...

The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.

“Science is magic that works.”

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 ...

Now, in our lifetime, scientists are finding ever newer evidence for what some religious people called presence in the very organizing energy of the universe—from fractals, to holograms, to electro-ma...

The Double Helix, James Watson’s 1968 memoir about discovering the structure of DNA, describes the roller coaster of emotions he and Francis Crick experienced through the progress and setbacks of the ...

Atoms are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appear...

On December 2, 1943, a German air raid in Italy sank over a dozen ships docked in port. Among them was an American vessel carrying over two thousand mustard gas bombs intended for the war. Soon, toxic...

* 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...

Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.

Sir Alexander Fleming (1881–1955), the British microbiologist and co-recipient of the 1945 Nobel Prize for Medicine for the discovery of penicillin, often credited his breakthrough to a fortunate acci...

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'

Now, technology is everywhere. I don’t mean just glowing screens and digital devices; I mean the whole apparatus of “easy everywhere” that has come into existence in just over the span of one human li...

Let us, then, cultivate an attitude of courage as over against the investigations of the day. None should be more zealous in them then we. None should be more quick to discern truth in every field, mo...

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

When you look from the perspective of a scientist at the universe, it looks as if it knew we were coming. There are 15 constants—the gravitational constant, various constants about the strong and weak...

Science ... is organized common sense.

Recently I heard a lecture by an English Methodist who is both a scientist and a Christian theologian. He was talking about the scientific debate over the Big Bang, and he used an image that I found q...

The significance and joy in my science comes in those occasional moments of discovering something new and saying to myself, ‘So that’s how God did it.’ My goal is to understand a little corner of God’...

It was late October 1991. The crew of the fishing boat Andrea Gail , out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, had taken the vessel five hundred miles out into the Atlantic. A cold front moving along the...

Science may be weird and incomprehensible--more weird and less comprehensible than any theology--but science works. It gets results. It can fly you to Saturn, slingshotting you around Venus and Jupite...

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...

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you. (this quote is attributed to Heisenberg, but questioned for it’s...

Faith is not something that goes against the evidence, it goes beyond it. The evidence is saying to us, 'There is another country. There is something beyond mere reason'.

One way to learn the mind of the Creator is to study His creation. We must pay God the compliment of studying His work of art and this should apply to all realms of human thought. A refusal to use our...