Book Reviews
Book Reviews
Here are some quotes from John Lennox book "God's undertaker: Has science buried God"
‘All my studies in science… have confirmed my faith.’
Sir Ghillean Prance FRS
‘Next time that somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: “what kind of evidence is there for that?” And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you belief a word they say.’
Richard Dawkins FRS
‘The existence of a limit to science is, however, made clear by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things- questions such as “how did everything begin?”, “what are we all here for?”, “what is the point of living?”’
Sir Peter Medawar
‘If cows and horses or lions had hands and could draw, then horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, cows like cows, making their bodies similar in shape to their own’.
Xenophanes, 500 BC
I am not postulating a “God of the gaps”, a god merely to explain the things that science has not yet explained. I am postulating a God to explain why science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains’.
Richard Swinburne
‘ To the majority of those who have reflected deeply and written about the origin and nature of the universe, it has seemed that it points beyond itself to a source which is nonphysical and of great intelligence and power. Almost all of the great classical philosophers - certainly Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Locke, Berkeley - saw the origin of the universe as lying in a transcendent reality. They had different specific ideas of this reality, and different ways of approaching it; but that the universe is not self-explanatory, and that it requires some explanation beyond itself, was something they accepted as fairly obvious’-Keith Ward
‘Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the right conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan’.
Arno Penzias, Physics Nobel Prize-winner
‘But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place… The watch must have had a maker: there must have existed… an artificer… who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction and designed its use… Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation’-William Paley
‘Large evolutionary innovations are not well understood. None has ever been observed, and we have no idea whether any may be in progress. There is no good fossil record of any-Paul Wesson
‘Well, as common sense would suggest, the Darwinian theory is correct in the small, but not in the large. Rabbits come from other slightly different rabbits, not from either [primeval] soup or potatoes. Where they come from in the first place is a problem yet to be solved, like much else of a cosmic scale’- Sir Fred Hoyle
‘Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the earth some 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave. Nobody knows’-Stuart Kaufmann
‘It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism’-Anthony Flew
‘What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, warm breath, nor a “spark of life”. It is information, words, instructions… Think of a billion discrete digital characters… If you want to understand life think about digital technology’-Richard Dawkins
‘The concept of information is central both to genetics and evolutionary theory’-John Maynard Smith
‘Life is digital information’-Matt Ridley
‘The problem of the origin of life is clearly basically equivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information’-Bernd-Olaf Kuppers
‘Our task is to find an algorithm, a natural law that leads to the origin of information’-Manfred Eigen
‘A machine does not create any new information, but it performs a valuable transformation of known information’-Leonard Brillouin
‘Arthur Dent to Ford Prefect: ‘Ford!’ he said, ‘there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out’-Douglas Adams
‘You don’t need to be a mathematician or a physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck’-Richard Dawkins
'In the beginning was the bit’-Han Christian von Baeyer
‘In the beginning was the word’-The Christian apostle John
I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives us a lot of factual information, puts all of our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.’Erwin Schrodinger