SCIENCE
AND CHRISTIANITY
In this modern world of ours many people seem to think that science has somehow made such religious ideas as immortality untimely or old fashioned. I think science has a real surprise for the skeptics. Science, for instance, tells us that nothing in nature, not even the tiniest particle, can disappear without a trace. Nature does not know extinction. All it knows is transformation. If God applies this fundamental principle to the most minute and insignificant parts of His universe, doesn’t it make sense to assume that He applies it to the masterpiece of His creation, the human soul?
Dr. Werner von Braun, founder of U.S. space exploration program
I regard my research as a loving duty to seek the truth in all things, in so far as God has granted.
Nicolas Copernicus, astronomer
Since peace is alone in the gift of God; and as it is He who gives it, why should we be afraid? His unspeakable gift in His beloved Son is the ground of no doubtful hope.
Letter written by Michael Faraday, to a fellow scientist
Science and religion no more contradict each other than light and electricity.
William Hiram Foulkes
There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science.
C.F. Gauss
Looking at the earth from this vantage point [of the moon], looking at this kind of creation and to not believe in God, to me, is impossible. To see (earth) laid out like that only strengthens my beliefs.
John Glenn
Therefore … , invoking the most holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His Most Glorious Mother Mary, We pronounce this Our final sentence: We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo … have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy. … From which it is Our pleasure that you be absolved, provided that with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, in Our presence, you abjure, curse, and detest, the said error and heresies, and every other error and heresy contrary to the Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome.
Indictment of 1630, from the Holy Tribunal
Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.
T.H. Huxley
If I can’t believe that the spacecraft I fly assembled itself, how can I believe that the universe assembled itself? I’m convinced only an intelligent God could have built a universe like this.
Jack Lousma, astronaut
No sciences are better attested than the religion of the Bible.
Isaac Newton
There is but one God the Father of whom are all things and we in him and one Lord Jesus Christ by whom are all things and we by him.
Isaac Newton
The rational order that science discerns is so beautiful and striking that it is natural to ask why it should be so. It could only find an explanation in a cause itself essentially rational. This would be provided by the Reason of the Creator … we know the world also to contain beauty, moral obligation and religious experience. These also find their ground in the Creator in his joy, his will and his presence.
John Polkinghorne
Christianity believes that God has created an external world that is really there; and because He is a reasonable God, one can expect to be able to find the order of the universe by reason.
Francis A. Schaeffer
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’s plan.
Henry “Fritz” Schaefer.
The Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia.
It seems to me that when confronted with the marvels of life and the universe, one must ask why and not just how. The only possible answers are religious. I find a need for God in the universe and in my own life.
Arthur L. Schawlow.
Professor of Physics at Stanford University who shared the 1981 Physics Nobel Prize with Bloembergen and Siegbahn for their contribution to the development of laser spectroscopy.