A friend asked me for a list of my favorite quotes about various topics covered in my book. Here’s a list of top quotes from famous scientists (most have won Nobel Prizes and other accolades) about the apparent design in nature. It should be noted that many of these scientists would classify themselves as agnostics or atheists.
This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” – Sir Isaac Newton
“The chances that life just occurred on earth are about as unlikely as a typhoon blowing through a junkyard and constructing a Boeing 747.” – Sir Fred Hoyle (Hoyle, an atheist, was so impressed with the precision of the chemical formation of carbon that he thought it looked as if “a superintellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology.”)
“How was it that the initial density of the universe was chosen so carefully? Maybe there is some reason why the universe should have precisely the critical density?” – Stephen Hawking
“It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.” – Stephen Hawking
“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
“The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming,” – Freeman Dyson
“Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the right conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying, one might say ‘supernatural,’ plan.” – Arno Penzias
“Mindless, blundering atoms have conspired to make not just life, not just mind, but understanding. The evolving cosmos has spawned beings who are able not merely to watch the show, but to unravel the plot.” – Paul Davies
“Consistent with the Maker Thesis, features of the universe and our planetary home appear to be customized for the existence of intelligent creatures and scientific activity; it is as if we were meant to uncover the secrets of the world around us.” – Melissa Cain Travis
“The world is too complicated in all its parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together.” – Allan Sandage