from book:  ("Show Me God", revised ed, 1997; Fred Heeren; Day Star Pub.)

Hyder / Summer 98 (QUOTE-CE.WPS)
 

1. Albert Einstein:

p.72 "Pleading with readers of the N.Y. Times to take measures against nuclear self-destruction, Einstein said: 'Science has brought forth this danger, but the real problem is in the minds and hearts of men.'"

p.79 "...the harmony of natural law ... reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection."

p.103 "Einstein initially preferred the 'static universe' explanation and felt so strongly about it that he added a fudge factor, officially called his 'cosmological constant' into his relativity equations in order to preserve the idea of a universe without a beginning. Contrary mounting evidence, especially from astronomy, led Einstein to admit this addition as a great mistake and to hold, as nearly all cosmologists now do, that the universe must have had a beginning."

p.110 "Einstein tried to find an explanation for his general relativity equations that would not require a beginning and a Beginner for the universe, and he came away a believer in both. He later wrote of his desire 'to know how God created the universe.'"

p.119 "... General relativity shows that the space in our universe is not just nothing. Einstein wrote: 'There is no such thing as an empty space, i.e., a space without field. Space-time does not claim existence on its own, but only as a structural quality of the field.'"

(The book continues "... to the physicist, when he asks about how something came from nothing, that means not only, how did matter arise out of nothing, but why did space and time exist in the first place, that matter may emerge from them? When physicists speak of the expansion of the universe from a singularity, they are not speaking on an expansion within a larger space, but rather of space itself expanding with the big bang. There is nothing 'outside' the universe. And yet it is this kind of nothingness from which the universe must have sprung. In this 'true nothingness' nothing, including the phenomena of quantum physics, could happen.")

p.135 "After this Einstein wrote not only of the necessity for a beginning, but of his desire 'to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thought, the rest are details.'"

(the book continues "... since the early 1960s ... science has turned from its disposition to hold to an eternal universe, holding instead to a universe with a beginning, as the general theory of relativity clearly predicts.")

p.186 "... Einstein's notion of God ... 'Subtle is the Lord,' said Einstein, 'but malicious He is not.'
 
 

2. Stephen Hawking:

p.108 "Stephen Hawking, widely regarded as the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein ... although he has come up with a mathematical proposal to suggest how time and space might be finite but without boundary, he calls this mathematical model 'imaginary time' and emphasizes that this is 'just a proposal: it cannot be deduced from some other principle.' 'In real time ... the universe has a beginning ...'"

p.109 "In his introduction to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Carl Sagan says that Hawking has reached the tentative conclusion that our universe has 'nothing for a Creator to do'; he says the book is 'perhaps about the absence of God'. However, the book makes it quite clear that Hawking carefully distinguishes between 'the real time in which we live' ... and his mathematical proposal, which by definition speculates on the possibility of no boundaries in space or time - and hence no beginning. Hawking himself claims no conclusion about the absence of a Creator. ... he has told me that even if his proposal turned out to describe the real universe, no conclusions could be drawn about God's absence, but rather about His nature: 'I do not believe the no-boundary proposal proves the noneexistence of God, but it may affect our ideas of the nature of God. We do not need someone to light the blue touch paper of the universe.' ... stress as Hawking does, that his proposal is merely a mathematical one: 'it may be put forward for aesthetic or metaphysical reasons, but the real test is whether it makes predictions that agree with observation.' ... No one has yet proposed a physical explanation to go with the mathematical model."

p.165 "... on April 24, 1992, astrophysicist George Smoot finally announced that the COBE satellite had measured the expected 'ripples' in the microwave background radiation. ... Though the fluctuations in the background were smaller than some had anticipated ... they were clearly distinguishable from noise.

... Smoot's quote: 'If you're religious, it's like looking at God.'

Stephen Hawking, whose own work had recently sought alternatives to a universe with a beginning ... called them 'the most important discovery of the century, if not of all time.'

... The findings added evidence ... to the impression that our universe began in an incredibly well-organized manner, a manner that almost seemed orchestrated in a way that would distribute matter for our benefit, allowing for the formation of stars and galaxies."

p.208 "Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking mentions this ratio between the masses of the proton and the electron as one of many fundamental numbers in nature, and he says, 'The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.'"

p.209 "As another example of his 'very finely adjusted' numerical values in nature, Stephen Hawking points out that 'if the electric charge of the electron had been only slightly different, stars either would have been unable to burn hydrogen and helium or else they would not have exploded' meaning that the heavier elements necessary for life would not have been available. He concludes, '... it seems clear that there are relatively few ranges for the numbers that would allow the development of any form of intelligent life.'"

p.212 "After completing most of his work on singularities and the big bang in 1983, Stephen Hawking told a reporter:

'The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the big bang are enormous ... I think clearly there are religious implications whenever you start to discuss the origins of the universe. There must be religious overtones. But I think most scientists prefer to shy away from the religious side of it.'"

p.213 "Once one takes into consideration the 'flight time' of our universe, the chance that our universe's expansion rate should meet the requirements for the balance we observe becomes ridiculously small; and the problem for those who wish to explain this occurrence by naturalistic means becomes equally large. Stephen Hawking expresses the problem this way:

'Why did the universe start out with so nearly the critical rate of expansion that separates models that recollapse from those that go on expanding forever, so that even now, ten thousand million years later, it is still expanding at nearly the critical rate? If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present state.'

p.223 "Today, scientists are searching for a short formula that would express a grand unification of all of nature's laws ... But what if scientists were to find such a formula? Would that explain how everything came to be - and came to be in a way that was so perfectly suited to us? Having considered this question, Stephen Hawking says:

'Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?'"

"Hawking's oft-quoted remark from A Brief History of Time, 'What place then for a Creator?' needs to be put in its proper context - as a question springing from his matheematical proposal of a universe without a beginning - and its ramificatioins for one particular type of God.

After describing how most people see God merely as the one who winds up the universe and then lets it go, he shows how his mathematical proposal of a universe without a beginning would dispatch such a weak concept of a Creator."

p.224 "Hawking himself wonders whether a universe that needs a Creator to exist should not also expect to feel His involvement in other ways: '... does he have any other effect on the universe?'

This seems to be the point he made in his remarks to me also, when he said that his no-boundry proposal does not imply God's non-existence, but it may affect our ideas about His nature. In any case, the evidence has led Hawking to recognize a critical place for a Creator - not just as the universe's initiator, but as that which 'breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.'"

"Like Hawking, other physicists see the logical necessity for something more than a set of physical laws at the beginning. ...

Difficulties in proposing a naturalistic cause for our universe's design inevitably bring us back again to difficulties in proposing a naturalistic cause for its existence. Ultimate causes are said to be outside of the domain of science; yet the questions of science inevitably point back to an ultimate cause - both of existence and of design - and science can give us no information about either."
 
 

3. Robert Boyle:

p.201 "... the father of modern chemistry, spoke of the 'laws of motion prescribed by the author of things.'"
 
 

4. Rene Descartes:

p.201 "... who created our modern concept of 'natural law,' wrote of the 'laws which God has put into nature.'"
 
 

5. Michael Faraday:

p.201 "It was partly because Michael Faraday believed that God was the unifying source behind the design of all phenomena that he discovered the fundamental relations between light and magnetism, and he came up with the concepts that laid the groundwork for modern electromagnetic field theory."
 
 

6. Johannes Kepler:

p.201 "... discoverer of the laws of planetary motion, wrote that in finding these natural laws he was merely 'thinking God's thoughts after Him.'
 
 

7. Francis Bacon:

p.202 "... father of the scientific method ... conclude that the divine Lawgiver could 'vary the laws of nature' at His will."
 
 

8. Isaac Newton:

p.202 "... Newton said that the solar system was 'not explicable by mere natural causes,' and that its structure could only be attributed to 'the counsel or contrivance of a voluntary agent.'"