The Mind of God Quotes

“No attempt to explain the world, either scientifically or theologically, can be considered successful until it accounts for the paradoxical conjunction of the temporal and the atemporal, of being and becoming. And no subject conforms this paradoical conjuction more starkly than the origin of the universe.”
― Paul Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World

“Tidak ada kesalah-pahaman mengenai ilmuwan yang lebih besar daripada kepercayaan yang berkembang bahwa mereka adalah individu-individu yang dingin, keras, dan tak berjiwa.”
― Paul C.W. Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World

“The order of the cosmos is more than mere regimented regularity, it is also organized complexity, and it is from the latter that the universe derives its openness and permits the existence of human beings with free will.”
― Paul C.W. Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World

“The popular image of mathematics as a collection of precise facts, linked together by well-defined logical paths, is revealed to be false. There is randomness and hence uncertainty in mathematics, just as there is in physics.”
― Paul C.W. Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World

“However, not all mathematical operations can be carried out by a program significantly less complicated than the operation itself. Indeed, the existence of uncomputable numbers implies that for some operations there exists no program. Thus some mathematical processes are intrinsically so complex that they cannot be encapsulated in a compact program at all.”
― Paul C.W. Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World

“The scientific culture that arose in Western Europe,” writes Barrow, “of which we are the inheritors, was dominated by adherence to the absolute invariance of laws of Nature, which thereby underwrote the meaningfulness of the scientific enterprise and assured its success.”
― Paul C.W. Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World

“Many people have an image of God as a sort of pyrotechnic engineer, lighting the blue touch-paper to ignite the big bang, and then sitting back to watch the show. Unfortunately, this simple picture, while highly compelling to some, makes little sense. As we have seen, a supernatural creation cannot be a causative act in time, for the coming-into-being of time is part of what we are trying to explain. If God is invoked as an explanation for the physical universe, then this explanation cannot be in terms of familiar cause and effect.”
― Paul C.W. Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World

“People often ask: Where did the big bang occur? The bang did not occur at a point in space at all. Space itself came into existence with the big bang. There is similar difficulty over the question: What happened before the big bang? The answer is, there was no “before.” Time itself began at the big bang.”
― Paul C.W. Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World

“At the heart of thermodynamics lies the second law, which forbids heat to flow spontaneously from cold to hot bodies, while allowing it to flow from hot to cold. This law is therefore not reversible: it imprints upon the universe an arrow of time, pointing the way of unidirectional change.”
― Paul C.W. Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World

“An eternal universe is incompatible with the continuing existence of irreversible physical processes.”
― Paul C.W. Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World

“Belief in a divine being who starts the universe off and then “sits back” to watch events unfold, taking no direct part in subsequent affairs, is known as “deism.” Here God’s nature is captured by the image of the perfect watchmaker, a sort of cosmic engineer, who designs and constructs a vast and elaborate mechanism and then sets it going.”
― Paul C.W. Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World

“In the seventeenth century it was fashionable to regard the universe as a gigantic machine that had been set in motion by God. Even today, many people like to believe in God’s role as a Prime Mover or First Cause in a cosmic chain of causation. But what does it mean for a God who is outside of time to cause anything? Because of this difficulty, believers in a timeless God prefer to emphasize his role in upholding and sustaining the creation at every moment of its existence. No distinction is drawn between creation and preservation: both are, to God’s timeless eyes, one and the same action.”
― Paul Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World