Maimonides Quotes

As a scientist, of course, we have to believe there is no supernatural. There are only natural entities in the universe. And those are the things that we study as natural scientists.

One of your American professors said that to study religion was merely to know the mind of man, but if one truly wanted to know the mind of God, you must study physics.

I would argue that the issue of God and the issue of science have the same roots.

The idea of an ordered and elegant universe is a lovely one. One worth clinging to. But you don't need religion to appreciate the ordered existence. It's not just an idea, it's reality. We're discovering the hidden orders of the universe every day.

The study and knowledge of the universe would somehow be lame and defective were no practical results to follow.

From Roger Bacon, the 13th century Franciscan who pioneered the scientific method, to George Lemaitre, the 20th century Belgian priest who first developed a mathematical foundation for the 'Big Bang,' people of faith have played a key role in advancing scientific understanding.

I lose sleep at night wondering whether we are intelligent enough to figure out the universe. I don't know.

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.

Traditionally, scientists have treated the laws of physics as simply 'given,' elegant mathematical relationships that were somehow imprinted on the universe at its birth, and fixed thereafter. Inquiry into the origin and nature of the laws was not regarded as a proper part of science.

According to the scientific naturalist version of cosmic history, nature is a permanently closed system of material effects that can never be influenced by something from outside - like God, for example.

There is no conflict between the ideal of religion and the ideal of science, but science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine.

Science is very good at answering the 'how' questions. 'How did the universe evolve to the form that we see?' But it is woefully inadequate in addressing the 'why' questions. 'Why is there a universe at all?' These are the meaning questions, which many people think religion is particularly good at dealing with.

No doubt it is true that science cannot study God, but it hardly follows that God had to keep a safe distance from everything that scientists want to study.

If God creates a world of particles and waves, dancing in obedience to mathematical and physical laws, who are we to say that he cannot make use of those laws to cover the surface of a small planet with living creatures?

Those theologians who are beginning to take the doctrine of creation very seriously should pay some attention to science's story.

When science tries to resolve its conflicts by adding and subtracting dimensions to the Universe like houses on a Monopoly board, we need to examine our dogmas.

We should get used to the idea that we'll probably never be able to find - and confirm - a good explanation of the ultimate origin of the universe, though I see no reason to believe that we can't press much further on this question than we have managed to date.

Primary causes are unknown to us; but are subject to simple and constant laws, which may be discovered by observation, the study of them being the object of natural philosophy.

Since most scientists are just a bit religious, and most religious are seldom wholly unscientific, we find humanity in a comical position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of miracles inside a black hole, while his religious intellect believes in them outside it.

I want to study theoretical physics because it is one of the hardest things there is.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

I think I always wanted to go into physics. What always fascinated me about science was the desire to understand what underlies it all, and I think physics is basically the study of that.

The study of Nature brings into a harmonious whole the questions of the Infinite, the Historic, and the Microscopic as part of the Great Creator's work.

I think religion and science operate in different regimes. Religion is a belief system that tries to give meaning and comprehension to peoples' lives. Science is more about the mechanics of the universe around us and the way in which it works. And I don't think those things have to be mutually exclusive.

The scientific content of Genesis 1-11 holds special significance for me because it revolutionized my thinking and, thus, changed my life's direction. Until I reached my late teens, my singular passion was science, astronomy in particular. My life's purpose was to learn more about the universe; nothing beyond that really interested me.