John Clayton Quotes

I'd be perfectly happy with a mathematically precise description of how time began. I see science and religion as being two completely different things. I don't see science as relevant to the question of whether or not there's a God.

I don't even really know what the big bang is, and so when people want to go through and say, 'Well, I believe that the universe started by God starting it,' that's fine by me.

God may exist, but science can explain the universe without the need for a creator.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

How does a cosmos without a bearded, bathrobed God in the sky pull off all the things that a bearded, bathrobed guy in the sky was supposed to have pulled off? If there was no God who said 'Let there be light,' where did we get all that light?

We don't have a solid theory of how the universe originated, but that doesn't mean we have to invoke a deity.

I'm always trying to figure out what God is and why matter exists and whether it contains spirit or not.

Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation.

God's only excuse is that he does not exist.

Our English language really says if you're not a theist, the only alternative is to be an atheist. What I'm trying to do is develop a language that will enable us to talk about God beyond the, what I think, are sterile categories of theism and atheism.

Time is not eternal but was created by God at the beginning.

God created the world; the laws of nature were created by God. True science tries to find out what God put in the world. The trouble is where scientists speculate about theology and they don't know what they're talking about because they weren't there. They can't speculate about the origins of life because they weren't there.

Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe.

Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.

Intellectually, now, I believe that it is a complete vanity to say positively there is no God.

I also think we need to maintain distinctions - the doctrine of creation is different from a scientific cosmology, and we should resist the temptation, which sometimes scientists give in to, to try to assimilate the concepts of theology to the concepts of science.

If you can define what God is, I can tell you whether I believe in it.

The split between religion and science is relatively new. Isaac Newton, who first worked out the laws by which gravity held the planets and even the stars in their traces, was sufficiently impressed by the scale and regularity of the universe to ascribe it all to God.

There was no religion in my life growing up. Did God invent us or did we invent God?

My view is that science only has something to say about a very particular notion of God, which goes by the name of 'god of the gaps'.

Religion and science look at reality differently.

The universe is incredibly wondrous, incredibly beautiful, and it fills me with a sense that there is some underlying explanation that we have yet to fully understand. If someone wants to place the word 'God' on those collections of words, it's OK with me.

Let me say that I consider myself a deep believer in the reality of God. I might define God quite differently from the way some people in the Christian faith would do so, but I do not doubt the reality of that experience.

I am not particularly religious. But I think we do face the question of where God is, why we are created and where does life go, why we exist. That sort of thing. And it is very hard to talk about it these days, because it cannot be proven. It is hard to discuss it rationally.

Only an unscientific ignoramus would hold to the thought that nothing created everything.