The Lovell Telescope, Jodrell Bank Observatory, United Kingdom
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom 1953 onward, Willy Fowler and I have always been intrigued by the remarkable relation of the 7.65 Mev energy level in the nucleus of Carbon 12 to the 7.12 Mev level in Oxygen 16. if you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just where these levels are actually found to be. Another put-up job? Following the above argument, I am inclined to think so. \u00a0A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nSir Fred Hoyle (Cambridge astrophysicist and perhaps wavering atheist),\u00a0\u201cThe Universe: Past and Present Reflections\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe ghostly presence of virtual particles\u00a0defies rational common sense and is non-intuitive for those unacquainted with physics. Religious belief in God, and Christian belief . . . may seem strange to common-sense thinking. But when the most elementary physical things behave in this way, we should be prepared to accept that the deepest aspects of our existence go beyond our common-sense understanding.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nAntony Hewish, British radio astronomer and 1974 Nobel laureate in Physics<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Two quotations from Modern Physics and Ancient Faith<\/em>, by Stephen M. Barr, a cosmologist and theoretical particle physicist at the University of Delaware:<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\u201cScience has given us new eyes that allow us to see down to the deeper roots of the world\u2019s structure, and there all we see is order and symmetry of pristine mathematical purity.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
\n
\u201cThe universe looks far more orderly to us now than it did to the ancients who appealed to that order as proof of God\u2019s existence.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Many people think that the advances of modern science make continued religious belief more difficult, if not altogether impossible. \u00a0To the contrary, I think \u2014 and I\u2019m not alone in thinking \u2014 that the science of today is in some ways distinctly more friendly to theism than the science of my high school and undergraduate days was. \u00a0For instance, intriguing suggestions of cosmic fine-tuning (such as that mentioned by Sir Fred Hoyle, above) were nowhere to be found when I was first paying serious attention to science. \u00a0Everything was purely mechanistic, random, apparently purposeless. \u00a0I didn\u2019t hear much about \u201cbeauty\u201d as a key to scientific discovery, or about the inexplicable orderliness of the cosmos or the \u201cunreasonable effectiveness of mathematics\u201d back then. \u00a0Nowadays, though, I do.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Posted from San Diego, California<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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