selected quotes from The Fire in the Equations, Kitty Ferguson
- The moment has come to stop treating religion as a monlith which asks us to accept only that there is a God and that God is the First Cause of teh universe....Can we believe whole-heartedly, without compromise, both in late twentieth-century science and in God - or would such simultaneous belief be double-think or other intellectual dishonesty? Is there a conflict, and if there is, where precisely is that conflict?
-If one interprets God as "the embodiment of the laws of physics" does that mean one belives "GOd" is accessible only to physicists?.....Suppose one believes in God not as the embodiment of the laws of physics, but as the source of them... the creator of a context in which such laws would inevitably arise and make a universe....Belief in this God isn't necessarily a belief that God had any particular purpose in creation or continues to be involved in it in any way. All it suggests is that there is (or once was) what Eistein calls a "rationality" what Hawking calls a "Mind of God" and that its existence somehow resulted in the universe.
-Does science contradict belief in this God? No. Any theory, no matter how fundamental its scope, which begs such a question as "Why should nothingness be unstable? ...Why shoudl uncaused events be possible rather than impossible?....Why this mathematical consistency and not another?...Why these laws and not others?...can be used to invoke this God. So can a reverence for the rationality of the universe. This is the God who competes with Mathematical and Logical Consistency and the Universe at the end of Chapter 4. Not proved by science, but also not ruled out.
-Belief in this God answers the question" Who done it?" but not the question "Why?".
-What if God had a motive?