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Sunday quotes, "Our Creative God"

"The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world."
(Psalm 19:1-6 NIV)

“The ancient covenant is in pieces: Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance." (Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, 1970)

“The cosmos is all that there is, or was, or ever will be.” (Carl Sagan, Cosmos)

“That man’s….origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; …that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, …all these things…are … so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's salvation henceforth be safely built.” (Bertrand Russell, "A Free Man's Worship")

“What may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities-his eternal power and divine nature-have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” (Rom 1:19-20)

"All this stuff — enough to form 50 billion galaxies, maybe fantastically more — is thought to have emerged roughly 14 billion years ago in less than a second, from a point with no physical dimensions. Set aside the many competing explanations of the big bang; something made an entire cosmos out of nothing. It is this realization — that something transcendent started it all — which has hard-science types such as Sandage using terms like 'miracle'." (Gregg Easterbrook)

“In three minutes ninety-eight percent of all the matter there is or ever will be had been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.” (Bill Bryson)

“The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.” (Stephen Hawking, quoted in J. Boslough, Stephen Hawking’s Universe, p. 121)

“Such (cosmological coincidences) seem to run through the fabric of the natural world like a thread of happy coincidences. But there are so many odd coincidences essential to life that some explanation seems required to account for them.” (Sir Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe)

“A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in Nature” (Sir Fred Hoyle “The Universe; Past and Present Reflections” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 1982)

“At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story [of the big bang] ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” (Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, p. 116)

"We can infer certain things from the fact of creation. God must be a being of infinite power to create 'out of nothing' all the enormous vastness and energy of the universe. He must also be a being of infinite wisdom to create a universe that is not only fine-tuned to exist, but is also fine-tuned for life on earth. He must have infinite freedom of the will to decide to create the universe." (David Kingston)

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable his judgments,
and his paths beyond tracing out!
"Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor?"
"Who has ever given to God,
that God should repay him?"
For from him and through him and to him are all things.
To him be the glory forever! Amen.
(Rom 11:33-36 NIV)

Is this your response? If not, why not?


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