Martha Rogerson > Martha's Quotes

“Everybody has got to live for something, but Jesus is arguing that, if he is not that thing, it will fail you. First, it will enslave you. Whatever that thing is, you will tell yourself that you have to have it or there is no tomorrow. That means that if anything threatens it, you will become inordinately scared; if anyone blocks it, you will become inordinately angry; and if you fail to achieve it, you will never be able to forgive yourself. But second, if you do achieve it, it will fail to deliver the fulfillment you expected. Let me give you an eloquent contemporary expression of what Jesus is saying. Nobody put this better than the American writer David Foster Wallace. He got to the top of his profession. He was an award-winning, bestselling postmodern novelist known around the world for his boundary-pushing storytelling. He once wrote a sentence that was more than a thousand words long. A few years before the end of his life, he gave a now-famous commencement speech at Kenyon College. He said to the graduating class, Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god . . . to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before [your loved ones] finally plant you. . . . Worship power, and you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful; it is that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.4 Wallace was by no means a religious person, but he understood that everyone worships, everyone trusts in something for their salvation, everyone bases their lives on something that requires faith. A couple of years after giving that speech, Wallace killed himself. And this nonreligious man’s parting words to us are pretty terrifying: “Something will eat you alive.” Because even though you might never call it worship, you can be absolutely sure you are worshipping and you are seeking. And Jesus says, “Unless you’re worshipping me, unless I’m the center of your life, unless you’re trying to get your spiritual thirst quenched through me and not through these other things, unless you see that the solution must come inside rather than just pass by outside, then whatever you worship will abandon you in the end.”
― Timothy Keller, Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life's Biggest Questions

“Most early scientists were compelled to study the natural world because of their Christian worldview. In Science and the Modern World, British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead concludes that modern science developed primarily from “the medieval insistence on the rationality of God.” Modern science did not develop in a vacuum, but from forces largely propelled by Christianity. Not surprisingly, most early scientists were theists, including pioneers such as Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Johannes Kepler (1571– 1630), Blaise Pascal (1623–62), Robert Boyle (1627–91), Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and Louis Pasteur (1822–95). For many of them, belief in God was the prime motivation for their investigation of the natural world. Bacon believed the natural world was full of mysteries God intended for us to explore. Kepler described his motivation for science: “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”
― Josh and Sean McDowell

“Thomas Aquinas writes: “There is within every soul a thirst for happiness and meaning.”
― Josh McDowell, More Than a Carpenter

“By the twentieth century, however, archaeological discoveries had confirmed the accuracy of the New Testament manuscripts. Early papyri manuscripts (the John Rylands manuscript, AD 130; the Chester Beatty Papyri, AD 155; and the Bodmer Papyri II, AD 200) bridged the gap between the time of Christ and existing manuscripts from later dates.”
― Josh and Sean McDowell

“The bibliographical test is an examination of the textual transmission by which ancient documents reach us from the past. In other words, since we don’t have the original manuscripts, we have to ask the questions: How reliable are the copies we have? How many manuscripts have survived? How consistent are they? What is the time interval between the original and the extant copies?”
― Josh and Sean McDowell

“Well over 200 biblical manuscripts (90 of which are New Testament) were discovered in the Sinai in 1975 when a hidden compartment of St. George’s Tower was uncovered. Some of these manuscripts are quite ancient. They [the recent manuscript discoveries] all confirm that the transmission of the New Testament has been accomplished in relative purity and that God knows how to preserve the text from destruction. In addition to the manuscripts, there are 50,000 fragments sealed in boxes. About 30 separate New Testament manuscripts have been identified in the fragments, and scholars believe there may be many more.”
― Daniel Wallace

“The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work of literature, with over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts catalogued, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic, Nubian, and Armenian.”
― Wikipedia: Biblical manuscript

“...historical and literary scholarship continues to follow Aristotle’s eminently just dictum that the benefit of doubt is to be given to the document. This means that one must listen to the claims of the document under analysis, and not assume fraud or error unless the author disqualifies himself by contradictions or known factual inaccuracies. (John Warwick Montgomery, Where Is History Going? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1969), 46.)”
― John Warwick Montgomery, Where Is History Going

“The laws of physics can be reduced to the harmonies of these strings. Chemistry is the melodies one can play on them. The universe is a symphony. And the mind of God, which Einstein eloquently wrote about, is cosmic music resonating throughout space-time.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“A man said to the universe:
'Sir, I exist!'
'However,' replied the Universe,
'The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.”
― Stephen Crane

“Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell's explanation of electricity and magnetism paved the way for the illumination of our cities and gave us powerful electric motors and generators as well as instantaneous communication via TV and radio.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Einstein's E=mc^2 explained the power of the stars and helped to unravel the nuclear force.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“When Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, and others unlocked the secrets of the quantum theory, they gave us the high tech revolution of today, with supercomputers, lasers, the internet, and all of the fabulous gadgets in our living rooms.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“[Democritus believed that] "everything could be reduced to tiny, invisible, indestructible particles he called atoms (meaning "invisible" in Greek). The critics, however, pointed out that direct evidence for atoms was impossible to acquire because they were too small to be observed. But Democritus could point out compelling, indirect evidence.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Pythagoras had the insight to apply a mathematical description to worldly phenomena like music. According to legend, he noticed similarities between the sound of plucking a lyre string and the resonances made by hammering a metal bar.
He found that they created musical frequencies that vibrated with certain ratios. So something as aesthetically pleasing as music has its origin in the mathematics of resonances. This, he thought, might show that the diversity of the objects we see around us must obey these same mathematical rules.
So at least two great theories of our world emerged from ancient Greece: the idea that everything consists of invisible, indestructible atoms and that the diversity of nature can be described by the mathematics of vibrations.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Johannes Kepler, who was one of the first to apply mathematics to the motion of the planets, was an imperial adviser to Emperor Rudolf Il and perhaps escaped persecution by piously including religious elements in his scientific work.

The former monk Giordano Bruno was not so lucky. In 1600, he was tried and sentenced to death for heresy. He was gagged, paraded naked in the streets of Rome, and finally burned at the stake. His chief crime? Declaring that life may exist on planets circling other stars.

The great Galileo, the father of experimental science, almost met the same fate. But unlike Bruno, Galileo recanted his theories on pain of death. Nonetheless, he left a lasting legacy with his telescope, perhaps the most revolutionary and seditious invention in all of science. With a telescope, you could see with your own eyes that the moon was pockmarked with craters; that Venus had phases consistent with its orbiting the sun; that Jupiter had moons, all of which were heretical ideas.

Sadly, he was placed under house arrest, isolated from visitors, and eventually went blind. (It was said because he once looked directly at the sun with his telescope.) Galileo died a broken man. But the very year that he died, a baby was born in England who would grow up to complete Galileo's and Kepler's unfinished theories, giving us a unified theory of the heavens.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Isaac Newton is perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived. In a world obsessed with witchcraft and sorcery, he dared to write down the universal laws of the heavens and apply a new mathematics he invented to study forces, called the calculus. As physicist Steven Weinberg has written, 'It is with Isaac Newton that the modern dream of a final theory really begins.' In its time, it was considered to be the theory of everything-that is, the theory that described all motion.

It all began when he was twenty-three years old. Cambridge University was closed because of the black plague. One day in 1666, while walking around his country estate, he saw an apple fall. Then he asked himself a question that would alter the course of human history. If an apple falls, then does the moon also fall?

Before Newton, the church taught that there were two kinds of laws. The first were the laws found on Earth, which were corrupted by the sin of mortals. The second were the pure, perfect, and harmonious laws of the heavens. The essence of Newton's idea was to propose a unified theory that encompassed the heavens and the Earth.

In his notebook, he drew a fateful picture (see figure 1).

If a cannonball is fired from a mountaintop, it goes a certain distance before hitting the ground. But if you fire the cannonball at increasing velocities, it travels farther and farther before coming back to Earth, until it eventually completely circles the Earth and returns to the mountaintop. He concluded that the natural law that governs apples and cannonballs, gravity, also grips the moon in its orbit around the Earth. Terrestrial and heavenly physics were the same.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be!
And all was light.”
― Alexander Pope

“So in the same way that Kepler and Galileo laid the foundation for Newtonian physics, Faraday paved the way for Maxwell's equations.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Every disciple needs three types of relationships in his life. He needs a 'Paul' who can mentor him and challenge him. He needs a 'Barnabas' who can come alongside and encourage him. And he needs a 'Timothy', someone that he can pour his life into.”
― Howard G. Hendricks

“With the introduction of radio, we now had a superfast. convenient, and wireless way of communicating over long distances. Historically, the lack of a fast and reliable communication system was one of the great obstacles to the march of history. (In 490 BCE, after the Battle of Marathon between the Greeks and the Persians, a poor runner was ordered to spread the news of the Greek victory as fast as he could. Bravely, he ran 26 miles to Athens after previously running 147 miles to Sparta, and then, according to legend, dropped dead of sheer exhaustion. His heroism, in the age before telecommunication, is now celebrated in the modern marathon.)

Today, we take for granted that we can send messages and information effortlessly across the globe, utilizing the fact that energy can be transformed in many ways. For example, when speaking on a cell phone, the energy of the sound of your voice converts to mechanical energy in a vibrating diaphragm. The diaphragm is attached to a magnet that relies on the interchangeability of electricity and magnetism to create an electrical impulse, the kind that can be transported and read by a computer. This electrical impulse is then translated into electromagnetic waves that are picked up by a nearby microwave tower. There, the message is amplified and sent across the globe.

But Maxwell's equations not only gave us nearly instantaneous communication via radio, cell phone, and fiber-optic cables, they also opened up the entire electromagnetic spectrum, of which visible light and radio were just two members. In the 166os, Newton had shown that white light, when sent through a prism, can be broken up into the colors of the rainbow. In 1800, William Herschel had asked himself a simple question: What lies beyond the colors of the rainbow, which extend from red to violet? He took a prism, which created a rainbow in his lab, and placed a thermometer below the color red, where there was no color at all. Much to his surprise, the temperature of this blank area began to rise. In other words, there was a "color" below red that was invisible to the naked eye but contained energy.

It was called infrared light.

Today, we realize that there is an entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, most of which is invisible, and each has a distinct wavelength. The wavelength of radio and TV, for example, is longer than that of visible light. The wavelength of the colors of the rainbow, in turn, is longer than that of ultraviolet and X-rays.

This also meant that the reality we see all around us is only the tiniest sliver of the complete EM spectrum, the smallest approximation of a much larger universe”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“Maxwell died in Cambridge of abdominal cancer on 5 November 1879 at the age of 48. His mother had died at the same age of the same type of cancer. The minister who regularly visited him in his last weeks was astonished at his lucidity and the immense power and scope of his memory, but comments more particularly,

... his illness drew out the whole heart and soul and spirit of the man: his firm and undoubting faith in the Incarnation and all its results; in the full sufficiency of the Atonement; in the work of the Holy Spirit. He had gauged and fathomed all the schemes and systems of philosophy, and had found them utterly empty and unsatisfying—"unworkable" was his own word about them—and he turned with simple faith to the Gospel of the Saviour.

As death approached Maxwell told a Cambridge colleague,

I have been thinking how very gently I have always been dealt with. I have never had a violent shove all my life. The only desire which I can have is like David to serve my own generation by the will of God, and then fall asleep.”
― Harman, etc

“He that would enjoy life and act with freedom must have the work of the day continually before his eyes. Not yesterday's work, lest he fall into despair, not to-morrow's, lest he become a visionary not that which ends with the day, which is a worldly work, nor yet that only which remains to eternity, for by it he cannot shape his action. Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life, and an embodiment of the work of eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises, because the present is given him for a possession.”
― James Clerk Maxwell

“In one letter, [Einstein] wrote despondently, "I am nothing but a burden to my relatives....It would surely be better if I did not live at all."
He finally managed to get a job as a clerk, third class, at the patent office in Bern. It was humiliating but actually a blessing in disguise. In quiet of the patent office Einstein could return to the old question that had haunted him since he was a child. From there, he would launch a revolution that physics and the world upside down.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“To Einstein, this insight was monumental. Either Newton or Maxwell was correct. The other had to be wrong. But how could it be that you could never catch up to light? At the patent office, he had plenty of time to ponder this question. One day, in the spring of 1905, it struck him while riding the train in Bern. "A storm broke loose in my mind," he would recall.
His brilliant insight was that since the speed of light is measured by clocks and metersticks, and since the speed of light is constant no matter how fast you move, space and time must be distorted in order to keep the speed of light constant!
It meant that if you are on fast-moving spaceship, then clocks inside the ship beat slower than clocks on the Earth. Time slows down the faster you move--this phenomenon is described by Einstein's special relativity.”
― Michio Kaku, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything

“A mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colors or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.”
― G. H. Hardy

“When Einstein kept repeating that God does not play with dice with the universe, Bohr reportedly said, "Stop telling God what to do.”
― Michio Kaku, Einstein, Bohr

“God is subtle, but not malicious.

I have second thoughts. Maybe God is malicious.”
― Einstein

“Pauli was the biggest cynic in physics and a critic of Einstein's program. He was famous for saying, "What God has torn asunder, let no man put together"--that is, if God had torn apart forces in the universe, then who were we to try to put them back together?”
― Michio Kaku, Pauli

“if I had known there would be so many particles with Greek names, I would have been a botanist rather than a physicist.”
― Enrico Fermi