God

"George Read thought the words [allowing the Federal government to “emit bills of credit” i.e., print paper money], if not struck out [of the Constitution] would be as alarming as the mark of the beast in Revelation."

"Robert: The three 6s. Monk: 6 is the sign of the devil. Jennings: But why three 6s? Monk: We think it means the diabolical trinity: the Devil, the Antichrist and the false prophet. Jennings: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Monk: For every holy thing there is an unholy one, that is the essence of temptation."

"The King will follow Christ, and we the King In whom high God hath breathed a secret thing."

"Man’s word is God in man."

"Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp’d town, to another due, Labour to admit you, but O, to no end. Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captived, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain, But am betroth’d unto your enemy; Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me."

"Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost; As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end."

"Strong Son of God, immortal Love, Whom we, that have not seen thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace, Believing where we cannot prove;Thine are these orbs of light and shade; Thou madest Life in man and brute; Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot Is on the skull which thou hast made.Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: Thou madest man, he knows not why, He thinks he was not made to die; And thou hast made him: thou art just."

"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."

"For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart."

"The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance."

"The Islamic God has nothing in common with man: he is a Presence without measure, blending personality and impersonality in himself. [...] For the Christian, it is clear here what the Trinity means to him, namely that God is a relationship between persons, that is, intrinsically human. [...] The Christian God is a person and can only be understood as a relationship between persons."

"There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it."

"Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name:That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth;And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

"And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God."

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.The same was in the beginning with God.All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.In him was life; and the life was the light of men.And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not."

"God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."

"Once one starts to admit anthropic interpretations of fine-tuning problems like the cosmological constant, it is clear that such a proposal might be made for other fine-tuning problems, such as the problem of the Higgs boson mass. Certainly, we would not be here if the Higgs boson mass, and hence also the and and and masses, were greatly bigger. If they were near the , for example, any collection of more than a few elementary particles would collapse into a Black Hole. More generally, if the elementary particle masses were scaled up by a factor N, the number of elementary particles in a star or planet would scale down like N–3, and for very modest N the stars would stop shining."

"We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago. We are in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past and if we have one explanation for what's happening in the distant past why should we need more?"

"Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven, Give us this day our daily bread: And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive them that trespass against us: And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, For ever and ever. Amen."

"Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me."

"In fact Sax was suspicious of all the current cosmology, placing humanity as it did right at the center of things, time after time. It suggested to Sax that all these formulations were artifacts of human perception only, the strong anthropic principle seeping into everything they saw, like color."

"Whereas originally the hopes for string theory, and its descendants, were that some kind of uniqueness would be arrived at, whereby the theory would supply mathematical explanations for the measured numbers of experimental physics, the string theorists were driven to find refugee in the strong anthropic argument in an attempt to narrow down an absolutely vast number of alternatives. In my own view, this a very sad and unhelpful place for a theory to find itself."

"By inclination, Weinberg is an extreme reductionist. But he is also a realist and acknowledges when something is not working the way he might want it to. In 1987 the arch-reductionist concluded that certain facts seemed to be inconsistent with any explanation based on the usual kind of mathematical reasoning. Instead, it seemed they might be true only because if they were not, we observers could not be here to observe them. Weinberg undoubtedly disliked such anthropic-principle explanations. But when, to his disappointment, he found that the anthropic principle might explain the apparent vanishing of the cosmological constant, he said so loudly and clearly, despite the great hostility of the physics community toward the principle."

"The theory of the inflationary multiverse changes the way we think about our place in the world. According to its most popular version, our world may consist of infinitely many exponentially large parts, exhibiting different sets of low-energy laws of physics. Since these parts are extremely large, the interior of each of them behaves as if it were a separate universe, practically unaffected by the rest of the world. This picture, combined with the theory of eternal inflation and anthropic considerations, may help to solve many difficult problems of modern physics, including the cosmological constant problem."

"Many scientists are still ashamed of using the . Just as the friends of were afraid of using the name , the opponents of the anthropic principle often say that they do not want to use the 'A' in their research."

"What the anthropic principle depends upon is the idea that whatever is the nature of the universe, or universe portion that we see about us, being subject to whatever dynamical laws govern its actions, this must be strongly favourable to our very existence."

"The old cosmological constant problem is to understand why the is so small; the new problem is to understand why it is comparable to the present mass density. ... does not help with either; anthropic considerations offer a possibility of solving both. In theories with a that takes random initial values, the anthropic principle may apply to the cosmological constant, but probably to nothing else."

"Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love."

"I think the Anthropic Cosmological Principle brings to us an idea perhaps as old as humanity itself: that we are not at all just an accidental anomaly, the microscopic caprice of a tiny particle whirling in the endless depth of the universe. Instead, we are mysteriously connected to the entire universe, we are mirrored in it, just as the entire evolution of the universe is mirrored in us."

"Why was there a Big Bang? What, if anything, came before? What mechanisms generated the exponential inflation of the early Universe? What are dark matter and dark energy, which dominate today's Universe? How did the first stars and galaxies form? Why are the fundamental constants of nature what they are? Must we depend on the Cosmic Anthropic Principle to 'answer' such questions? Is our Universe unique, or must we appeal to a Multiverse? What will be the ultimate fate of our Universe?"

"Until recently, it might have seemed that we were an unhappy bit of mildew on a heavenly body whirling in space among many that have no mildew on them at all. this was something that classical science could explain. Yet, the moment it begins to appear that we are deeply connected to the entire universe, science reaches the outer limits of its powers. Because it is founded on the search for universal laws, it cannot deal with singularity, that is, with uniqueness. The universe is a unique event and a unique story, and so far we are the unique point of that story. But unique events and stories are the domain of poetry, not science. With the formulation of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, science has found itself on the border between formula and story, between science and myth. In that, however, science has paradoxically returned, in a roundabout way, to man, and offers him — in new clothing — his lost integrity. It does so by anchoring him once more in the cosmos."

"Science does not accept Aristotelian styles of explanation, that a stone falls because of its nature... it likes to be on Earth... Within science, all causes must be local and instrumental. Purpose is not acceptable as an explanation... Action at a distance, either in space or time, is forbidden. Especially, teleological influences of final goals upon phenomena are forbidden. ...The choice of laws of nature, and the choice of initial conditions for the universe, are questions belonging to meta-science and not to science. Science is restricted to the explanation of phenomena within the universe. Teleology is not forbidden when explanations go beyond ...into meta-science. The most familiar example of a meta-scientific explanation is the so-called Anthropic Principle. ...It accords with the spirit of modern science that we have two complementary styles of explanation, the teleological style allowing a role for purpose in the universe at large, and the non-teleological style excluding purpose..."

"Matter in quantum mechanics is not an inert substance but an active agent, constantly making choices between alternative possibilities according to probabilistic laws. ...It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every electron. ...Our brains appear to be devices for the amplification of the mental component of the quantum choices made by molecules inside our heads. ...There is evidence from peculiar features of the laws of nature that the universe as a whole is hospitable to the growth of mind. ...an extension of the Anthropic Principle up to a universal scale."

"What we hear about eternal inflation or the string landscape, seems somehow unavoidably to lead to some kind of multiverse. However, it seems to me there is a fundamental problem there. Once of course you have the multiverse, then you can start playing around and try to find probability or getting to the anthropic principle, or whatever. But the point is that the picture is essentially a classical one, and it is difficult to see that if you have many universes, coming essentially with an inflationary state, that there would not be plenty of horizons in this. Now the quantum mechanics of horizons is, I think, perfectly not understood. The simplest example is the black hole, where after all nobody knows really if the problem lies in the singularity or if it lies really already in the horizon."

"What makes the Anthropic Principle and the Gaia Hypothesis so inspiring? One simple thing: Both remind us, in modern language, of what we have long suspected, of what we have long projected into our forgotten myths and perhaps what has always lain dormant within us as archetypes. That is, the awareness of our being anchored in the earth and the universe, the awareness that we are not here alone nor for ourselves alone, but that we are an integral part of higher, mysterious entities against whom it is not advisable to blaspheme. This forgotten awareness is encoded in all religions. All cultures anticipate it in various forms. It is one of the things that form the basis of man's understanding of himself, of his place in the world, and ultimately of the world as such."

"The gap between a dumb and a clever person may appear large from an anthropocentric perspective, yet in a less parochial view the two have nearly indistinguishable minds."

"Whitrow... proposed an anthropic resolution of the venerable philosophical question Why physical space has three dimensions? (arguing that with a space of different dimensionality there would be no living being to pose the question) and, similarly to [Grigory Moiseevich] Idlis, alluded around 1955 to an anthropic explanation of the size of the observable universe. Anyway, he never published these last ideas, which were developed years later by Wheeler. The only reference to Whitrow’s argument that appeared in print during the 1950s seems to be that due to the philosopher of religion Eric Lionel Mascall, who attributed to the English’s mathematician thatit may be necessary for the universe to have the enormous size and complexity which modern astronomy has revealed, in order for the earth to be a possible habitation for living beings."

"To say that Nature displays intelligence doesn't make you a Christian fundamentalist. Einstein said as much, and a fascinating theory called the anthropic principle has been seriously considered by Stephen Hawking, among others."

"There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of the universe and what can be more special than that there is no boundary?"

"The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge. You see, even if you dismiss mankind as just a mere hiccup in the great scheme of things, the fact remains that the entire universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life — almost contrived — you might say a "put-up job"."

"... when non-perturbative phenomena are included, there is no problem from the string theory point of view in effecting continuous transitions between Calabi-Yau spaces of different topology. This shows that stringy ideas about geometry are really more general than those found in classical Riemannian geometry. The moduli space of Calabi-Yau manifolds should thus be regarded as a continuously connected whole, rather than a series of different ones individually associated with different topological objects ... Thus, questions about the topology of Calabi-Yau spaces must be treated on the same footing as questions about the metric on the spaces. That is, the issue of topology is another aspect of the the moduli fields. These considerations are relevant to understanding the ground state of the universe."

"Of these ‘ways of being’ of the world around us, noted with greater or lesser understanding, but with equal evidence, by philosophers and common intelligence, there are two that modern science has marvellously explored, ascertained and deepened beyond all expectations:"

"Aquinas believes that human beings (even in our earthly condition here below) can have knowledge, scientific knowledge of God's existence, as well as knowledge that he has such attributes as simplicity, eternity, immateriality, immutability, and the line. In Summa Theologiae Aquinas sets out his famous Five Ways or five proofs of God's existence: in Summa Contra Gentiles he sets out the proof from motion in much greater detail; and in each case he follows these alleged demonstrations with alleged demonstrations that God possesses the attributes just mentioned. So natural knowledge of God is possible. [...] So most of those who believe in God do so on faith. Fundamentally, for Aquinas, to accept a proposition on faith is to accept it on God's authority; faith is a manner of "believing God" (ST, IIa, IIae, ii, 2) "for that which is above reason we believe only because God has revealed it" (SCG, I, 9)."

"If the primitive experience of the ancients could offer reason sufficient arguments for the demonstration of God's existence, with the broadening and deepening of the field of experience itself, the footprint of the Eternal now shines more brightly and clearly in the visible world. It therefore seems worthwhile to re-examine, on the basis of new scientific discoveries, the classic proofs of the Angelic Doctor, especially those derived from the motion and order of the universe; that is, to investigate whether and to what extent a deeper knowledge of the structure of the macrocosm and microcosm contributes to strengthening philosophical arguments; and then to consider, the other hand, whether and to what extent they have been shaken, as is often claimed, by modern physics having formulated new fundamental principles and abolished or modified ancient concepts whose meaning was perhaps considered fixed and defined in the past, such as time, space, motion, causality and substance, concepts that are extremely important for the question that now concerns us. Rather than a revision of the philosophical proofs, it is therefore a question here of scrutinising the physical bases — and we shall necessarily have to restrict ourselves to only a few, for reasons of time — from which those arguments derive. Nor are there any surprises to be feared: science itself does not intend to leave that world which, today as yesterday, presents itself with those five ‘modes of being’ from which the philosophical demonstration of the existence of God takes its starting point and its strength."

"I remember the precise moment, one day in 1894, as I was walking along Trinity Lane, when I saw in a flash (or thought I saw) that the ontological argument is valid. I had gone out to buy a tin of tobacco; on my way back, I suddenly threw it up in the air, and exclaimed as I caught it: "Great Scott, the ontological argument is sound!""

"St. Anselm argued that since we can imagine a perfect being, he must exist—because he would not be perfect without the added perfection of existence. This so-called ontological argument was more or less promptly attacked on two grounds: (1) Can we imagine a completely perfect being? (2) Is it obvious that perfection is augmented by existence? To the modern ear such pious arguments seem to be about words and definitions rather than about external reality."

"The existence of God may be proved in five ways. The first and most manifest way is the argument from motion. ...Whatever is in motion is moved by another, for nothing can be in motion except it have a potentiality for that toward which it is being moved. ...It is ...impossible that from the same point of view and in the same way anything should be both moved and mover, or that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. This cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover; as the staff only moves because it is put into motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a First Mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God."

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest – whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories – comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect. If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument."

"God thus includes the world; he is, in fact, the totality of world parts, which are indifferently causes and effects. Now AR [absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others] is equally far from either of these doctrines; thanks to its two-aspect view of God, it is able consistently to embrace all that is positive in either deism or pandeism. AR means that God is, in one aspect of himself, the integral totality of all ordinary causes and effects, but that in another aspect, his essence (which is A), he is conceivable in abstraction from any one or any group of particular, contingent beings (though not from the requirement and the power always to provide himself with some particulars or other, sufficient to constitute in their integrated totality the R aspect of himself at the given moment)."