science on The Enlightenment

To a twentieth-century mind the notion of a virgin birth is intrinsically and preposterously inconceivable. If a woman claims–such claims are made from time to time–to have become pregnant without sex...

“Yes, yes, I see it all! — an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial...

When I observe the luminous progress and expansion of natural science in modern times, I seem to myself like a traveller going eastwards at dawn, and gazing at the growing light with joy, but also wit...

According to legend, Archimedes had his most famous epiphany while stepping into a tub. As he stepped into the bath, he saw that the level of the water rose proportional to the amount of his body imme...

All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.

* 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...

The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist.

Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.

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 ...

The humanistic moral values of secularism are not the deliverances of scientific reasoning, but have come down to us from older times . . . they have a theological history. And modern people hold them...

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...

“Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”

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...

Charles Darwin, known for his theory of natural selection, noticed that his later life included a “loss of happiness.” While he never acknowledged that it might have been related to his changing world...

Science ... is organized common sense.

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 ...

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

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...

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings.

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 ...

Do not be afraid of being free thinkers. If you think strongly enough you will be forced by science to the belief in God, which is the foundation of all Religion. You will find science not antagonisti...

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 ...

In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I ...

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...

Science is the century-old endeavour to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thorough-going an association as possible. To put it boldly, it is...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...