The Luminous Web Quotes

“I read science for the same reason I read theology: because I am a seeker after truth.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“Lorenz’ discovery was the beginning of a new science—the science of chaos—which, along with relativity and quantum physics, provided the third great revolution in physical science this century.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“particles became planets, galaxies, clusters, and superclusters. Atoms became blue-green algae, toads, palm trees, and swans. Space became here or there, as time became then or now.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“While he said that as a scientist, I heard him as a theologian, and began to wonder if the universe might have a “memory” that pre-dates the big bang. Back before that explosion triggered the expansion of time and space, there was that egg of the universe in which all places were one place and all things were one thing. I would call it the garden of Eden, only the beauty of the garden lay in its diversity. The beauty of this earlier reality was its unity, its total coherence. Mind, matter, and time were not yet different. They were all floating in the same yolk. Then the universe was born and the one became many. Quantum”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“In Jesus’ case, those phenomena include the boiling up of death into everlasting life.21”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“Likewise, says Polkinghorne, the simple act of boiling water gives us a parable of what scientists call a “phase change.” At 100 degrees Centigrade a very small amount of water becomes a very large amount of steam as H2O moves from the liquid regime to the gaseous one. While the liquid and the gas behave in different ways, they remain the same substance. The laws of nature have not changed; only their consequences have. When Polkinghorne considers the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, what he sees is a phase change. Jesus was the first puff of steam in a new regime, which some of us call the kingdom of God. As a physicist, Polkinghorne knows that a new regime is accompanied by new phenomena.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“His inquisitors were not impressed. On June 22, 1633, when he was seventy years old, Galileo got down on his knees in the great hall of a Dominican convent in Rome and read the renunciation they had written for him. Wishing to remove from the minds of your Eminences and of every true Christian this vehement suspicion justly cast upon me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I do abjure, damn, and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally each and every other error, heresy, and sect contrary to the Holy Church; and I do swear for the future that I shall never again speak or assert, orally or in writing, such things as might bring me under similar suspicion.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“Galileo spent the last eight years of his life under house arrest in his villa outside Florence. While his daughter read him the seven daily psalms of penitence that were part of his sentence, the old man sat by the window, where he could watch the planets through his telescope.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“Through his observation of the seasons and his reading of the classics, Copernicus believed that the sun, not the earth, belonged at the center of things. He also guessed what trouble that swap might cause, which was why he delayed publication of his work until his death was imminent. Although the church was undergoing its own revolution at the time, both Protestants and Catholics agreed on Copernicus. “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?” John Calvin howled out loud, while Martin Luther simply called the man a fool.8 Some fifty years later, when Galilei Galileo surveyed the heavens through the telescope he had made, he concluded that Copernicus had been right. After a high-handed campaign to convert the pope to his cosmology, Galileo was ordered to appear before the Inquisition, where he was reminded that the issue was not scientific merit but obedience. In his defense, Galileo quoted the words of Cardinal Baronio, who said, “The Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”9”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“Penzias called Dicke. Dicke drove to Holmdel. The two teams got together and realized that what they were hearing was nothing less than the hiss of fossil radiation still echoing from the big bang. Furthermore, the temperature of the sound was 2.7 degrees, which was the same value predicted a decade earlier by George Gamow and his colleagues Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman. Penzias and Wilson won a Nobel Prize for their discovery of cosmic background radiation, which effectively launched the science of cosmology.19 In 1992, when scientists found cosmic ripples in that background radiation that matched up with their best guesses about how galaxies came to be, Berkeley astronomer George Smoot told reporters that it was “like looking at the face of God.”20”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“Jesus’ birth. We took a celebration of the s-u-n and turned it into a celebration of the s-o-n. That is also why Easter falls on the first Sunday on or after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. The date does not have anything to do with the exact day Jesus rose from the dead. We simply took over an ancient fertility festival of new life on earth and reinterpreted it as a sacred festival of new life in Christ.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“That is how the pagan festival of the winter solstice in late December became the festival of”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“to exist. An old Jewish folk tale makes the same point. One day God said to Abraham, “If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be here,” to which Abraham replied, “True, but if I weren’t here there wouldn’t be anyone to think about you.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“In 1996, Pope John Paul II endorsed evolution as part of God’s master plan, just four years after he lifted the Roman Catholic Church’s three-hundred-fifty-year-old condemnation of Galileo. When he first ordered a reexamination of Galileo’s case in 1980, he made a statement that might have applied to Darwin as well. “Research performed in a truly scientific manner can never be in contrast with faith,” he said, “because both profane and religious realities have their origin in the same God.”7”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“No scientific theory, including evolution, can pose any threat to religion—for these two great tools of human understanding operate in complementary (not contrary) fashion in their totally separate realms: science as an inquiry about the factual state of the natural world, religion as a search for spiritual meaning and ethical values. STEPHEN JAY GOULD”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“When truth and belief come into conflict, it is better to change one’s belief to fit the truth than to change the truth to fit one’s belief.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“Above all, how can we continue to speak of God in ways that lead us to live divided lives, without ever addressing the significant (and valuable) differences between religious and scientific ways of thinking? People of faith may be excused for wanting to avoid the dialogue, but not for avoiding it. Our faith in an incarnational God will not allow us to ignore the physical world, nor any of its nuances.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“Today’s certainty can always become tomorrow’s antique notion, which makes doubt an essential tool in the scientific investigation of reality.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“Templeton is interested in what he calls “humility theology,” which emphasizes the need for both scientists and religious believers to recognize the limits in their way of knowing and leave room for the other. As American humorist Will Rogers put it, “We’re all ignorant, just on different subjects.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“Although Albert Einstein was not a conventionally religious man, one of his most often repeated quotations is “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion

“But if God is one, then how can reality be two? If God is the origin of all that is—earth, moon, and stars, as well as spirit, soul, and consciousness, then how can science (which means to tell me the truth about physical reality) and religion (which means to tell me the truth about spiritual reality) be enemies? And why should living my life require me to use two different operating manuals? If God is truly one and truly God of all, then how can truth be divided?”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion