Victor J. Stenger · 287 pages
Rating: (7.1K votes)
“The most fundamental laws of physics are not restrictions on the behaviour of matter. Rather, they are restrictions on the way physicists may describe that behaviour.”
“The claim that the universe *began* with the big bang has no basis in current physical and cosmological knowledge. The observations confirming the big bang do not rule out the possibility of a prior universe.”
“We have yet to encounter an observable astronomical phenomenon that require a supernatural element to be added to a model in order to describe the even...Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God.”
“The complex order we now observe [in the universe] could *not* have been the result of any initial design built into the universe at the so-called creation. The universe preserves no record of what went on before the big bang. The Creator, if he existed, left no imprint. Thus he might as well have been nonexistent.”
“Infinity...is used in physics simply as a shorthand for "a very big number.”
“The God of the gaps argument for God fails when a plausible scientific account for a gap in current knowledge can be given. I do not dispute that the exact nature of the origin of the universe remains a gap in scientific knowledge. But I deny that we are bereft of any conceivable way to account for that origin scientifically.”
“The transition of nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any agent.”
“I think that anyone who is a true junkie has an innate kinship with other junkies. Somehow I knew that we shared mutual interests; that addiction speaks to you. Without knowing it, you’re attracted to them.”
“We still make love to organs and not people; that so far from realising that people are never more idiosyncratic, never more totally there when they make love, we re never more incommunicative, never more alone.”
“Adam took one hand off the handlebars and fingered the envelope in his inside pocket like a schoolboy the day before his birthday feeling the shape of a present in the hope of discovering some clue as to its contents. He felt certain that whatever it contained would not be to anyone's advantage now his father was dead, but it did not lessen his curiosity.”
“There was no point in lying. "Yes. I am following you."
Her carefully controlled exterior faltered. "Why?"
"Because I like you. I'm sorry if that makes you nervous."
All the color drained from her face. "I thought you thought I was crazy."
"I like crazy."
"You're unbelievable," she grumbled.
"So I've been told.”
“ The spectacle of nature, by growing quite familiar to him, becomes at last equally indifferent. It is constantly the same order, constantly the same revolutions; he has not sense enough to feel surprise at the sight of the greatest wonders; and it is not in his mind we must look for that philosophy, which man must have to know how to observe once, what he has every day seen." Jean Jacques Rousseau, On the Inequality among Mankind, Ch. 1, 20.”
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