astronomers-from-brazil

"When most people think of nature, they want to look for perfection and for symmetry and balance, ... But if you really pay attention you are going to see that what actually makes nature tick are the imbalances, the imperfections, the asymmetries."

"...Our spiritual attachment to nature transcends religion, being part of our innermost nature as a thinking species in a mysterious cosmos."

"Science treads in the same footsteps of our ancestors, answering to our longing to understand where we fit in as we look up to the sky."

"Not surprisingly, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, ExxonMobil scientists understood quite well the mechanisms of climate change and its broad implications for the oil business."

"I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. "I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe." Period. It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, "Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that." And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," and all that. This positions me very much against all of the "New Atheist" guys."