Religion Quotes - Page 94

When confronted with a demand that the universe have a cause, infidels have usually pointed out that God was not much of an explanation. This is true enough, but not really a positive argument. After mechanistic explanation became popular, infidels liked to restrict causality to the chain of causes in an eternal material universe, pointing out that no supernatural cause was then necessary. Plausible, but still rather defensive. Today's skeptic can do better. In all likelihood, the universe is uncaused. It is random. It just is.

Creation out of absolute nothing is a metaphysical quagmire for theists anyway, since nothing must at least have the potentiality for becoming something. Since theists are stuck with potentiality, it might as well be something like a quantum vacuum.

In the popular imagination, the Big Bang is a great explosion; at one time there was nothing, then matter erupted into previously empty space. However, the Big Bang is the beginning of spacetime itself, not an event in time.

Asking about a time before the beginning of our spherical spacetime is like asking what lies north of the North Pole. There is no such thing.

Quantum mechanics is so counter-intuitive, physicists have never been able to come up with a comfortable picture of how it works.

To talk intelligibly about modern physics, we have to admit the possibility of uncaused events.

Attaching a Creator to the boundary is metaphysical skullduggery.

Mankind ought to be taught that religions are but the varied expressions of THE RELIGION, which is Oneness, so that each may choose the path that suits him best.

...the synagogin', the tabernaclin', the psalmin', that goes on in this hoose, that's enough to break the spirits o' ony young creature.

Betrayal of any kind is hard, but betrayal by one's religion is excruciating. It makes you want to rage and weep.

It was one time when people thought the value of the fine structure constant was important. Now of course it's still important, of course, as a practical matter,but we now know that the value it has is a function, that in any fundamental theory you derive the fine structure constant as a function of all sorts of mass ratios and so on and it's not really that fundamental.

All over the world, belief in the supernatural has authorised the sacrifice of people to propitiate bloodthirsty gods, and the murder of witches for their malevolent powers.

The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit.

I was known to spout off about [ politics and religion] sometimes, especially in my drinkin' days! It was pretty dangerous actually.

How can we be so confident that we are correct about the religion of Islam that it is really different in this insidious way and people 50 years from now, people aren`t going to back on.

We must never forget that both good and evil flow from the Bible. It is therefore not above criticism.

No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.

[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.

Real science can be far stranger than science fiction and much more satisfying.

News for the godless: religion is inescapable. there has never been a human society without some form of worship. And don't point to communist societies like the Soviet Union - they worshipped blue jeans.

I know that the pope's infallible, but that doesn't mean he can't make mistakes.

The Word of God proves the truth of religion; the corruption of man, its necessity; government, its advantages.

Nothing but religion is capable of changing pains into pleasures.

Religion has nothing more to fear than not being sufficiently understood.