James C. Maxwell Quotes

Nothing can be produced out of nothing.

The question of the origin of the matter in the universe is no longer thought to be beyond the range of science - everything can be created from nothing. It is fair to say that the universe is the ultimate free lunch.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

Professor Hawking is heralded as 'the genius of Britain,' yet he believes in the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything and that life sprang from non-life. Why should anyone believe Mr. Hawking's writings if he cannot provide evidence for his unscientific belief that out of nothing, everything came?

If there be an infinite Being, he does not need our help - we need not waste our energies in his defense.

The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist.

In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?

Does God exist? Well, I would say, 'not yet'.

It would be a sign of great simplicity to think that the world was created in six days, or indeed at all in time; [...] Time is a thing posterior to the world. Therefore it would be correctly said that the world was not created in time, but that time had its existence in consequence of the world. For it is the motion of the heaven that has displayed the nature of time.

I think the probability of a supernatural creator existing is very very low.

The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.

God never made something out of nothing; it is not in the economy or law by which the worlds were, are, or will exist

We cannot start with God and deduce the universe from his existence; we must start with the world as we know it, and deduce God from the world.

The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain.

Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. (The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible.

God's existence needs to be established independently before he can be brought into account for causation; it cannot be assumed at the start.

You have to stop thinking logically to argue that the universe came into being by itself, out of nothing.

Pascal makes no attempt in this most famous argument to show that his Roman Catholicism is true or probably true. The reasons which he suggests for making the recommended bet on his particular faith are reasons in the sense of motives rather than reasons in the sense of grounds. Conceding, if only for the sake of the present argument, that we can have no knowledge here, Pascal tries to justify as prudent a policy of systematic self-persuasion, rather than to provide grounds for thinking that the beliefs recommended are actually true.

The impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for 
the existence of God.

Nothing can come out of nothing, any more than a thing can go back to nothing.

The proofs of the existence of God are to such an extent fallen into discredit that they pass for something antiquated, belonging to days gone by.

A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was a tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect, he becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all‐knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified.

So when people tell you, oh, you can't have the Ten Commandments on public property, they're just wrong. It's historically false. It's not true. Now, you can decide to invent a new America in which you shouldn't say "one nation under God" as part of the pledge because, after all, you will offend three atheists. But that's not the America you inherited. That's a different country. And I think it's a weaker country and I think it's a country that has no roots in terms of where its rights come from.

There is no doubt that a parallel exists between the big bang as an event and the Christian notion of creation from nothing.

I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.