04 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Carl Sagan on the Belief in God
I think it's impossible to be a scientist and to confront, even occassionally, the grandure, subtlety, elegance and magnificience of the universe without feeling a sense of reverence and awe, but that's very different from concluding that there's a god who issues punishments and rewards after your dead or that prayer works or that the bible is written by anybody but fallible human beings.
[...]
The word god is used to cover so many different points of view... First of all, you can be religi...A very political commentary on the subject. Beautiful rhetorically.
18 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Natural Laws are Universal
...the order of the Universe is not an
assumption; it's an observed fact. We detect the light from distant
quasars only because the laws of electromagnetism are the same
ten billion light years away as here. The spectra of those quasars
are recognizable only because the same chemical elements are
present there as here, and because the same laws of quantum
mechanics apply. The motion of galaxies around one another
follows familiar Newtonian gravity. Gravitational lenses and
binary pulsar spin-...The laws of nature are comprehensible and the same across the Universe.