The Return of the God Hypothesis Quotes

“For Newton, as for Boyle and Descartes, there were laws of nature only because there had been a [Divine] Legislator.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Augustine captured the two ideas in two Latin coinages, which prima facie cut against each other: imago dei and peccatum originis. The former says that humans are unique as a species in our having been created in the image and likeness of God, while the latter says that all humans are born having inherited the legacy of Adam’s error, “original sin.”61”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Suppose Ms. Jones falls asleep on the couch on a warm weekend afternoon while watching television. On awakening, she steps outside and sees that (1) the driveway of her house is glistening with water and (2) the car in the driveway is also wet. She decides to investigate. From those two pieces of evidence, she might conclude using the above abductive syllogism (if it rains, the streets will get wet, etc.) that it rained while she was asleep. But based on the two facts at hand she might just as logically conclude that the automatic sprinklers came on or that someone washed her car. With only the data that the driveway and the car are wet, these explanations are equally plausible. But suppose our groggy investigator also sees that (3) the lawn and the street are perfectly dry and (4) there isn’t a cloud in the sky. Now what might she conclude? Although the sprinkler hypothesis and the rainstorm hypothesis are still possible, these explanations seem much less likely in the light of the additional evidence (facts 3 and 4). Now, finally, suppose she looks a little harder and sees (5) a bucket with soapy water and a sponge sitting behind the car. With the final piece of data, the best explanation for observations 1 through 5 becomes obvious: someone washed the car. This everyday scenario provides a good example of making an inference about a past cause based upon present observations using abductive reasoning enhanced with the method of inference to the best explanation.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“The classic nursery rhyme speaks of a broken Humpty, whom not even “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” can reassemble into a properly organized egg. Similarly, Tompa and Rose have demonstrated mathematically that even having all the requisite parts for a cell will not ensure that those ingredients will self-organize into a living system.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“the job of the natural philosopher was not to ask what God must have done, but what God actually did.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Although the Cambrian explosion of animals is especially striking, it is far from the only “explosion” of new living forms. The first winged insects, birds, flowering plants, mammals, and many other groups also appear abruptly in the fossil record, with no apparent connection to putative ancestors in the lower, older layers of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock. Evolutionary theorist Eugene Koonin describes this as a “biological big bang” pattern. As he notes, “Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. The relationships between major groups . . . do not seem to fit the pattern that, following Darwin’s original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“As Paul Davies (Fig. 7.6) has marveled, “The really amazing thing is not that life on earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ‘constants’ were off even slightly.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Many have also noted that this fine tuning strongly suggests design by a preexistent intelligence. As the British physicist Paul Davies put it in 1988, “The impression of design is overwhelming.”31 Similarly, astrophysicist Luke Barnes notes: “Fine tuning suggests that, at the deepest level that physics has reached, the Universe is well put-together. . . . The whole system seems well thought out, something that someone planned and created.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Over the years, as Hoyle thought more about the discovery of the exact resonance level of carbon that he had predicted, and especially about all the factors that had to be just right to make carbon relatively easy to produce inside stars, he became convinced that some intelligence had orchestrated the precise balance of forces and factors in nature to make the universe life-permitting.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“The fine tuning of these properties has puzzled physicists not only because of their extreme improbability, but also because there doesn’t seem to be any necessary physical or logical reason why they have to be as they are. Philosophers of science call such fine-tuning features “contingent” properties, since they could conceivably have been different without violating either the fundamental laws of physics or any necessary principle of logic or mathematics.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Consequently, Vilenkin argues that evidence for a beginning is now almost unavoidable. As he explains, “With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape; they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Within a decade, Borde, Vilenkin, and a third physicist, Alan Guth, one of the original proponents of inflation, had come to a startling conclusion: the universe must have had a beginning, even if inflationary cosmology is correct.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Poe proposed that the universe was not old enough to give light sufficient time to get to the earth from the most remote regions of the vast night sky.17 And if it was not old enough, that meant it was not of infinite age.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“What is the thing or the entity or the process from which everything else comes?”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Intellectual historians and historians of science typically identify the shift away from the theistic foundations of modern science with three major developments in Western intellectual history: first, the Enlightenment idea that human reason could replace and function autonomously from religious belief;1 second, the increasing skepticism about the existence of God, or at least about the soundness of arguments for God’s existence, among many Enlightenment philosophers; and third, the rise of scientific materialism and with it both new norms of scientific practice and a worldview allegedly based on science that affirms matter and energy, rather than God, as the fundamental reality from which everything else comes.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Newton thought that “knowledge of God’s power and wisdom could be inferred from the intelligence seemingly displayed in the designs of nature.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“How came the Bodies of Animals to be contrived with so much Art, and for what ends were their several Parts? Was the Eye contrived without Skill in Opticks, and the Ear without Knowledge of Sounds? . . . And these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from Phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent?”84”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Another biblical idea influenced the development of an observational and experimental approach. Even as scientists during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw human reason as a gift of a rational God, these same scientists, many influenced by the Protestant Reformation and ideas from the church fathers recovered during the late Middle Ages, also recognized the fallibility of humans and, therefore, the fallibility of human ideas about nature.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Moreover, since nature had been designed by the same rational mind who had designed the human mind, the early modern scientists (or, again, “natural philosophers”)54 who began to investigate nature also assumed that nature was intelligible. It could be understood by the human intellect. The founders of modern science assumed that if they studied nature carefully, it would reveal its secrets. Their confidence in this assumption was grounded in both the Greek and the Judeo-Christian idea that the universe is an orderly system—a cosmos, not a chaos.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Scientific materialists have traditionally answered that question by affirming that matter, energy, and/or the laws of physics are the entities from which everything else came and that those entities have existed from eternity past as the uncreated foundation of all that exists. Matter, energy, and physical laws are, therefore, viewed by materialists as self-existent.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Burnham’s comment, offered in 1992, came in response to the discovery of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) by the COBE satellite, providing another dramatic confirmation of the big bang model and its implication of a beginning. Yet it is not only cosmology that has rendered the “God hypothesis” newly respectable. As one surveys several classes of evidence from the natural sciences—cosmology, astronomy, physics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and paleontology—the God hypothesis emerges as an explanation with unique scope and power. Theism explains an ensemble of metaphysically significant events in the history of the universe and life more simply, more adequately, and more comprehensively than major competing metaphysical systems, including not only materialism and naturalism, but also pantheism and deism”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“As the British biologist and philosopher J. B. S. Haldane once said, “If mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I [would] have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence no reason for supposing my brain to be made of atoms.”23”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Nobel Prize–winning physicist Charles Townes has said, “as one sees it from a scientific point of view, seems to be quite real. This is a very special universe: it’s remarkable that it came out just this way. If the laws of physics weren’t just the way”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Müller’s talk echoed his earlier technical publications making the same points. In a provocative technical book, “Origination of Organismal Form,” Müller and biologist Stuart Newman argued that neo-Darwinism has “no theory of the generative.”12 In other words, neo-Darwinism cannot explain what caused new forms of life to arise. In this book, published nearly 150 years after the Origin of Species, Müller and Newman characterized the “origination of organismal form” as an unsolved problem for evolutionary theory. Yet, again, the origin of biological form is precisely what Darwinism, and later neo-Darwinism, claimed to explain. Other evolutionary biologists have echoed this concern. Many now repeat an old aphorism affirming that mutation and natural selection can account for “the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest”13—that is, small-scale variations, but not large-scale innovations in biological form.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Do we just have to accept some worldview or another as a presupposition through which we interpret reality? Or can we rationally evaluate different worldviews as competing metaphysical hypotheses and determine which, if any, is most likely to be true? And if so, can scientific evidence, perhaps even evidence about biological and cosmological origins, help us evaluate the likely truth of competing systems of thought (Fig”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“We apparently live in a kind of “Goldilocks universe,” where the fundamental forces of physics have just the right strengths, the contingent properties of the universe have just the right characteristics, and the initial distribution of matter and energy at the beginning exhibited just the right configuration to make life possible. These facts taken together are so puzzling that physicists have given them a name—the fine-tuning problem.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“The laws of nature not only reflected the past action of a divine creator who established the conditions necessary for orderly and regular natural processes, but the fundamental laws of nature also depend upon the ongoing and sustaining activity of a divine legislator.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“more reason to expect an opened lock in the case of an intelligently guided try than we would if the try was unguided”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“The discovery of the fine tuning of the universe, like the discovery of the beginning of the universe itself, represents an effect that requires a cause with specific attributes, including both transcendence and intelligence.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Origin-of-life simulation experiments increasingly suggested that simple chemicals do not arrange themselves into complex information-bearing molecules, nor do they move in life-relevant directions—unless, that is, biochemists actively and intelligently guide the process.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God