Quotes About Universe

If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution.

bad things, like good things don't happen any more often than they ought to by chance. the universe has no mind, no feelings, and no personality, so it doesn't do things in order to either hurt or please you. bad things happen because things happen.

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an expla nation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic.

In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.

An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles—except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don't yet understand. If

To suggest that the first cause, the great unknown which is responsible for something existing rather than nothing, is a being capable of designing the universe and of talking to a million people simultaneously, is a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation. It is a dreadful exhibition of self-indulgent, thought denying skyhookery.

A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In

Carl Sagan was proud to be agnostic when asked whether there was life elsewhere in the universe. When he refused to commit himself, his interlocutor pressed him for a 'gut feeling' and he immortally replied: 'But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.

However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.

Go out into a big field with a football and plonk it down to represent the sun. Then walk 25 metres away and drop a peppercorn to represent the Earth's size and its distance from the sun. The moon, to the same scale, would be a pinhead, and it would be only 5 centimetres away from the peppercorn. But the nearest other star, Proxima Centauri, to the same scale, would be another (slightly smaller) football located about … wait for it … six and a half thousand kilometres away!

The evolution of complex life, indeed its very existence in a universe obeying physical laws, is wonderfully surprising - or would be but for the fact that surprise is an emotion that can exist only in a brain which is the product of that very surprising process

to pray': 'to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy'.

It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets in our galaxy, and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe.

Smolin's idea, expounded in The Life of the Cosmos, hinges

if by "God" one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying . . . it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.

Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist's metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe.

Returning to humanity's need for comfort, it is, of course, real, but isn't there something childish in the belief that the universe owes us comfort, as of right?

light from different stars produces 'rainbows' that are different in very particular ways, and this can tell us a lot about the stars.

Creative intelligences, being evolved arrived late in the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.

I define a replicator as anything in the universe of which copies are made.

A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief.

A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple.

The pre-eminent mystery is why anything exists at all.