Cosmological Origins Quotes

It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.

Where did God come from? If we decide this is an unanswerable question why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question.

I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science. It has no beginning and no end.

Who then can calculate the path of the molecule? how do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by the fall of grains of sand?

[C]reationists [and] other religious enthusiasts [are], in many parts of the world ..., the most dangerous adversaries of science.

Creation is not taking place now, so far as can be observed. Therefore, it was accomplished sometime in the past, if at all, and thus is inaccessible to the scientific method.

One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth..." Whatever our speculations may be in regard to a "beginning," and when it was, it is written in the rocks that, like the animals and plants upon its surface, the earth itself grew.

...from schools to universities to research institutes, we teach about origins in disconnected fragments. We seem incapable of offering a unified account of how things came to be the way they are.

The question is: is the way the universe began chosen by God for reasons we can't understand, or was it determined by a law of science? I believe the second. If you like, you can call the laws of science 'God', but it wouldn't be a personal God that you could meet, and ask questions.

No doubt, the most challenging class of questions in science is the origin of things.

What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.

It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.

If we do get a quantum theory of spacetime, it should answer some of the deepest philosophical questions that we have, like what happened before the big bang?

On scientific grounds this big bang assumption is much less the palatable of the two. For it is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms. . . . On philosophical grounds too I cannot see any good reason for preferring the big bang idea. Indeed it seems to me in the philosophical sense to be a distinctly unsatisfactory notion, since it puts the basic assumption out of sight where it can never be challenged by a direct appeal to observation.

However far back we may be able to trace the - so to speak - internal history of the Universe, there can be no question of arguing that this or that external origin is either probable or improbable. We do not have, and we necessarily could not have, experience of other Universes to tell us that Universes, or Universes with these particular features, are the work of Gods, or of Gods of this or that particular sort.

Evolutionism as taught by Darwinism has nothing to say about how life originated. Has nothing to say about how the governing principles in the universe, gravity, thermodynamics, motion, how those originated. It's got some gigantic missing pieces.

One theory is that the universe came from nothing. i.e. perhaps bubble-universes collided, as in a bubble bath, and gave birth to the universe. Or perhaps the big bang was created by a bubble-universe which split into two universes. The universe does seem to be compatible with nothing.

This is a huge step toward unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1-what happened in the beginning. This is a Genesis machine. It'll help to recreate the most glorious event in the history of the universe.

No space, no time, no gravity, no electromagnetism, no particles. Nothing. We are back where Plato, Aristotle and Parmenides struggled with the great questions: How Come the Universe, How Come Us, How Come Anything? But happily also we have around the answer to these questions. That's us.

The only accounting we had of the origins and the structure of nature was Biblical Genesis.

Said the monk: "All these mountains and rivers and the earth and stars - where do they come from?" Said the master: "Where does your question come from?"