Belief in God in an Age of Science

domenica 27 dicembre 2009 Posted by tfrab

“The world is not full of items stamped “made by God” – the creator is more subtle than that – but there are two locations where general ints of his presence might be expected to be seen more clearly. One is the vast cosmos itself, with its fifteen-billion-year history of evolving development following the big bang. The other is the “thinking reed” of humanity, so insignificant in scale but, as Pascal said, superior to all the stars because it alone knows them and itself.[…]The distinguished theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, who was not a conventionally religious man, was once asked what was his fundamental belief. He strode to a blackboard and wrote that the laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations. It was a fitting affirmation by one whose fundamental discoveries had all come from his dedicated pursuit of mathematical beauty. This use of abstract mathematics as a technique of physical discovery points to a very deep fact about the nature of the universe that we inhabit, and to the remarkable conformity of human minds to its patterning. We live in a world whose physical fabric is endowed with transparent rational beauty”.

(John Polkinghorne - Belief in God in an Age of Science)