Charles Babbage Quotes

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

Miracles arise from our ignorance of nature, not from nature itself.

Miracles are God's coups d'etat.

I cannot prove that gods do not exist. Nor can I prove that the world and everything in it was not created by an entity or entities in the distant past. But I can tell you that in the millennia we elves have studied nature, we have never witnessed an instance where the rules that govern the world have been broken. That is, we have never seen a miracle. Many events have defied our ability to explain, but we are convinced that we failed because we are still woefully ignorant about the universe and not because a deity altered the workings of nature.

Miracles may be, for anything we know to the contrary, phenomena of a higher order of God's laws, superior to, and, under certain conditions, controlling the inferior order known to us as the ordinary laws of nature.

Miracles cannot be explained, that is their miraculous nature.

Once miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question.

Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree on what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear.

If one believes, then miracles occur.

Of course, supernatural acts are what miracles are all about. They are, after all, precisely those things that circumvent the laws of nature. A god who can create the laws of nature can presumably also circumvent them at will. Although why they would have been circumvented so liberally thousands of years ago, before the invention of modern communication instruments that could have recorded them, and not today, is still something to wonder about.

Convulsions in nature, disorders, prodigies, miracles, though the most opposite of the plan of a wise superintendent, impress mankind with the strongest sentiments of religion.

The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.

Religion believes in miracles, but these aren't compatible with science.

I believe the universe created us - we are an audience for miracles. In that sense, I guess, I'm religious.

Miracles have no claim whatever to the character of historical facts and are wholly invalid as evidence of any revelation.

Miracles seldom occur in the lives of those who do not consider them possible.

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.

But if we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed, you have no security against it. That is the bargain. Theology says to you in effect, 'Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events.

In our advanced technological age, most people deny the possibility of miracles.... Miracles don't happen, we are told, because they contravene the laws of nature and worse, they sound religious! Yet we live and move in a sea of miracle.

Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.

Our Lord reserved to Himself certain things which He would do in due time in a manner outside the course and order of nature, so that they would wonder and be astonished at seeing not great but unusual things, who are unmoved by things daily seen. For the government of the world is a greater miracle than feeding five thousand men from five loaves; yet at the former no one wonders, the latter astonishes all men: not as a greater wonder, but as a rarer.

To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Miracles do happen in every human life.

The most extraordinary of all the things called miracles, related in the New Testament, is that of the devil flying away with Jesus Christ, and carrying him to the top of a high mountain; and to the top of the highest pinnacle of the temple, and showing him and promising to him all the kingdoms of the world . How happened it that he did not discover America? or is it only with kingdoms that his sooty highness has any interest.