Science & Faith Quotes

• “Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.”
  by Pope John Paul II Letter to Reverend George V. Coyne, S.J.
• “We then claimed, as we still claim, to know much more about the real universe than the medievals did; and hoped, as we still hope to discover yet more truths about it in the future. But the meaning of the words 'know' and 'truth' in this context has begun to undergo a certain change.”
  by C. S. Lewis The Discarded Image p. 216.
• “I hope no one will think that I am recommending a return to the Medieval Model [of the universe]. I am only suggesting considerations that may induce us to regard all Models in the right way, respecting each and idolizing none.”
  by C. S. Lewis The Discarded Image p. 222.
• “To be aware of God's presence in nature, we have to attune ourselves to it, through prayer, meditation, contemplation. We have to learn to see nature differently, through the eyes of faith, rather than as an object to be engineered and mined for resources. It is of course sometimes necessary to regard nature as an object. It is necessary to get work done, and it is necessary in scientific investigation. But we can learn to balance this viewpoint with a sacramental understanding of nature, which would bring us more fully into the presence of God in our everyday life.”
  by Terence L. Nichols The Sacred Cosmos (2003) pp. 66-67.
• “A better approach is to acknowledge and proclaim God's design and creative hand in both the things science cannot explain and the things it can. God governs the regular functioning of the natural world whether or not science understands it yet. ... God's design in nature will not change, nor will nature's utter reliance on God's sustaining hand. God does not shrink as science advances.”
  by Deborah and Loren Haarsma Origins (2007) p. 40.
• “When scientists observe regular patterns in nature, such as the cycle of the seasons or the growth of new grass every spring, they try to understand how it works. In some cases, the patterns are so universal that scientists call them natural laws. The law of gravity is a prime example. ... Because gravity is so regular and reliable, scientists sometimes say, 'The law of gravity governs the solar system.' But Scripture tells us that this isn't the whole story. Natural laws don't govern; God governs. God speaks of his 'covenant with day and night and the fixed laws of heaven and earth' (Jer. 33:25). The regular patterns of day and night, summer and winter, and other fixed laws of nature were established by God's design. The fact that these patterns are so regular and understandable is a gift from God, without which we would not be able to understand the world.”
  by Deborah & Loren Haarsma Origins (2007) p. 36.
• “Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth ... and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgrace and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh and scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scriptures are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.”
  by St. Augustine The Literal meaning of Genesis via. Origins
• “... we are talking of a divine mystery when we use the word creation. It has no more business in a science course than do Incarnation and Redemption. Whatever their frustration with the atheism currently favored by the arrogant treatment of evolution in our public schools, I submit that Christians should be very careful lest they come to confuse just another scientific theory with divinely revealed truth.”
  by Patrick Henry Reardon Classroom Chaos
• “It is one thing to say that science is only equipped to test for natural causes and cannot speak to any others. It is quite another to insist that science proves that no other causes could possibly exist. . . . There would be no experimental model for testing the statement: ‘No supernatural cause for any natural phenomenon is possible.’ It is therefore a philosophical presupposition and not a scientific finding.”
  by Tim Keller The Reason for God
• “Evangelicals will value the scientific method (though not as a pathway to knowledge of God), but they will always be on the alert against scientism, the naturalist philosophy that makes use of science for its own ends.”
  by Donald G. Bloesch Essentials of Evangelical Theology: God, Authority, & Salvation (1978) p. 16.
• “When we are received into the Christian community, ... we are received into a tradition which claims authority. ... This tradition, like the scientific tradition, embodies and carries forward certain ways of looking at things, certain models for interpreting experience. Unlike the scientific tradition, at least in its present form, this tradition is not confined to a limited set of questions about the rational structure of the cosmos. Specifically, unlike science, it concerns questions about the ultimate meaning and purpose of things and human life -- questions which modern science eliminates as a matter of methodology.”
  by Lesslie Newbigin The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989) p. 49.
• “Nature divorced from God leads to creativity divorced from creation.”
  by Ken Myers Touchstone Magazine (Sept 2009) p. 11.
• “The Christian church testifies that in the actual events of this finite, contingent, and yet rational world of warped space-time there are words and gestures through which the Creator and Sustainer of the world has spoken and acted. It is not that the events are anything other than part of the unbroken nexus of happenings within space-time that can be analyzed and classified along with all the rest. They are not 'interventions' by someone who is otherwise absent. And -- even more important -- it is not that we are talking about something called religious experience as a separate form of cognition.”
  by Lesslie Newbigin Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel in Western Culture (1986) p. 88.
• “A missionary encounter with our culture must bring us face to face with the central citadel of our culture, which is the belief that is based on the immense achievements of the scientific method ... the belief that the real world, the reality with which we have to do, is a world that is to be understood in terms of efficient causes and not of final causes, a world that is not governed by an intelligible purpose, and thus a world in which the answer to the question of what is good has to be left to the private opinion of each individual and cannot be included in the body of accepted facts that control public life.”
  by Lesslie Newbigin Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (1986) p. 79.
• “The famous reply of Laplace to the complaint that he had omitted God from his system -- `I had no need of that hypotheses' -- might stand as a motto for our culture as a whole. The vision of reality that comes to expression in Laplace's system still dominates, if I am not mistaken, popular thinking today in spite of all the changes in science itself that have taken place since his time. It assumes that the real world is that which can be `scientifically' explained by laws of cause and effect that can be expressed in mathematical terms.”
  by Lesslie Newbigin Foolisness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (1986) p. 65.
• “Once god gets pushed out of the process, then of course what happens must happen from within rather than from outside. Then you can caricature the idea of divine intervention. Because if you're a deist or an epicurean you've got this distant god, who if he's going to do anything in the world would have to reach down and rather incongruously mess around, and then go away again.”
  by N. T. Wright Interview
• “This is what we no longer spontaneously see. When we look up at the night sky, we do not see—as did the ancients—the glory of God. We have to be reminded of it, perhaps by a memorized quotation from Scripture. When we see the stars we do not hear "the music of the spheres," but only silence. When we think of gravity, we do not think of it as the body of love or the material expression of love, as Dante did. We do not see God's love at work in the very structure of matter.”
  by Peter Kreeft Love Sees with New Eyes
• “My conclusion is that it is not religion but atheism that requires a Darwinian explanation. It seems perplexing why nature would breed a group of people who see no purpose to life or the universe, indeed whose only moral drive seems to be sneering at their fellow human beings who do have a sense of purpose. Here is where the biological expertise of Dawkins and his friends could prove illuminating. Maybe they can turn their Darwinian lens on themselves and help us understand how atheism, like the human tailbone and the panda's thumb, somehow survived as an evolutionary leftover of our primitive past.”
  by Dinesh D'Souza God knows why faith is thriving
• “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen — not only because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else.”
  by C. S. Lewis
• “... the the sciences have in some way displaced the arts as vehicles of human interaction with the material world. Aesthetic criteria are sometimes employed in the choice between one scientific theory and another. ... That was one reason why Einstein believed that Clark Maxwell's equations were correct. Beauty has deserted the artist, and migrated to science.”
  by Colin E. Gunton The Triune Creator (1998), p. 233.
• “We’ve reduced mystery to a temporary problem that can be solved by reason. The ancient mind that produced myth, and the medieval mind that produced both a Dante and an Aquinas, combined mystery and order. They combined the conviction that the universe can be understood at least partly by human reason, and that the universe itself and the ultimate reality behind it is endlessly mysterious. They combined that, but we separate them. Some philosophers are rationalists, saying we can understand it all, and thus, there’s no mystery. Some are irrationalists, saying it’s all mystery. Those two halves of the human spirit haven’t changed, but their relationship has. They have become disintegrated. Sometimes it’s cynical and nihilistic, sometimes it’s optimistic and romantic, sometimes it’s just passionately existential-or something like that. What is often called the culture and the counterculture, and the classical versus romantic dualism of the nineteenth century, are all versions of that fundamental split.”
  by Peter Kreeft
• “The sheer absurdity of some of the statements made in the name of science should therefore alert us to their desperate concern to establish the self-createdness of the universe against any suggestions of its creation by the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
  by Colin E. Gunton The Triune Creator (1998) p. 40.
• “How easily it happens that where God is no longer understood as the overall creator and upholder of the universe, there is a reversion to the pagan attribution of agency to the impersonal worlds of molecules, evolution and chaos. The choice is inescapable: either God or the world itself provides the reason why things are as they are.”
  by Colin E. Gunton The Triune Creator (1998) p. 39.
• “Wisdom, whether biblical or philosophical, has always been in short supply, today probably more than ever. For the dominate modes of modern thought are frankly inhospitable to the pursuit of wisdom -- indeed, are skeptical about the very possibility of wisdom of the sort pursued in premodern times. ... I refer especially to the fact that our most honored form of gaining knowledge, modern science, is profoundly skeptical about the possibility of of wisdom.”
  by Leon R. Krass The Beginning of Wisdom (2003) p. 4.
• “If we understand nothing in the created order comprehensively, that is, fully, it can come as no surprise that the divine Artist must be immersed in deepest mystery. In his creation he gives us a taste of what his infinity is about: If the finite can so challenge us, who can speak adequately of the utterly unlimited One?”
  by Thomas Dubay The Evidential Power of Beauty (1999) p. 42.

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