Scientific Commentaries on the origins of existence
"We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it."1 ~ Alexander Polyakov
"The current scenario of the origin of life is about as likely as a tornado passing through a junkyard beside Boeing airplane company accidentally producing a 747 airplane"2 ~ Sir Fred Hoyle
"The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going."3 ~ Sir Francis Crick
"The simplest bacterium is so damned complicated from the point of view of a chemist that it is almost impossible to imagine how it happened.". ~ Harold Klein Chairman of the National Academy of Review of the origin of life
"One need never be ashamed of the intellectually respectability of belief in an intelligent creator; modern science has come down decisively on the side of the person who would posit such a belief. While Hume and Kant may have been right in their arguments that scientific proof for the existence of God cannot be made, they would surely be as impressed as I am with the compelling evidence that makes such a belief perfectly reasonable." ~ Dr. Walter Bradley
"The scientific community is prepared to consider the idea God created the universe a more respectable hypothesis today than at any time in the last 100 years" ~ Frederic B. Burnham, Science Historian
"There is only one actual universe, with a unique set of basic materials and physical constants, and it is therefore surprising that the elements of this unique set-up are just right for life when they might easily have been wrong. This is not made less surprising by the fact that if it had not been so, no one would have been here to be surprised. We can properly envision and consider alternative possibilities which do not include our being there to experience them."4 ~ J.L. Mackie, Well known atheist
"Slight variations in physical laws such as gravity or electromagnetism would make life impossible . . . the necessity to produce life lies at the center of the universe's whole machinery and design"5 ~ John Wheeler Princeton University, Professor of Physics
"The equations of physics have in them incredible simplicity, elegance, and beauty. That in itself is sufficient to prove to me that there must be a God who is responsible for these laws and responsible for the universe"6 ~ Paul Davies
"What we have found is evidence for the birth of the universe . . . It's like looking at God." ~ Professor George Smoot
Recent measurements by the Cosmic Background Explorer COBE and by the Hubble Space Telescope, both reported in 1992, seem to confirm beyond any reasonable doubt that the Big Bang cosmology is indeed correct. George Smoot, Professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Principle Investigator of the COBE team which made the discovery, said the above regarding these new observations.
"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. For the past three hundred years, scientists have scaled the mountain of ignorance and as they pull themselves over the final rock, they are greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries." ~ Professor Robert Jastrow
"Such properties 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."7 ~ Sir Fred Hoyle
"There is a necessary molecular complexity required to provide minimal life functions: processing energy, storing information, and replicating. Chemical evolution, as distinct from biological evolution, cannot look to mutation and natural selection to solve its problems, which don't solve the problems of macroevolution either. Chemical evolution addresses the development of living systems from a prebiotic soup which did not initially have molecules, much less systems, capable of replicating. The production of molecules such as protein, RNA and DNA from a prebiotic soup is extremely difficult to imagine. The original euphoria associated with the making of building blocks such as amino acids under prebiotic conditions by Stanley Miller in 1952 has gradually been replaced with a somber recognition that the assembly of such molecules into function biopolymers is indeed the real problem. It is analogous to the problem of selecting a sequence of letters by randomly picking out of a box of typeset and hoping to accidentally get a sequence that corresponds to words, sentences, and coherent paragraphs." ~ Unknown
"If the relationship between the strong force and the electromagnetic force were to vary only slightly, we would not have the quantum energy levels which allow the remarkable conversion of beryllium to carbon [nearly 100% efficient] and the partial conversion of carbon to oxygen. With slight changes in either of these constants, we would have had a universe either rich in beryllium and little, if any, carbon or alternatively, a universe rich in oxygen with no carbon. Since carbon is unique in its ability to chemically bond with almost all other elements in bonds that are stable but not too difficult to break [playing the critical role of the round pieces in a tinker toy set], it is remarkable that these forces are so precisely tuned to provide carbon in abundance, along with oxygen which is critical in its own right." ~ Unknown
"If the strong force which binds together the nucleus of atoms were just five percent weaker, only hydrogen would be stable and we would have a universe with a periodic chart of one element, which is a universe incapable of providing the necessary molecular complexity to provide minimal life functions of processing energy, storing information, and replicating. On the other hand, if the strong force were just two percent stronger, very massive nuclei would form, which are unsuitable for the chemistry of living systems. Furthermore, there would be no stable hydrogen, no long-lived stars, and no hydrogen containing compounds." ~ Unknown
