{"quotes":[{"text":"... For we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts: an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image.","author":"Sri Aurobindo","tags":["cosmology","destiny","fate","god","perfection"],"id":7998,"author_id":"Sri+Aurobindo"},{"text":"Individual events. Events beyond law. Events so numerous and so uncoordinated that, flaunting their freedom from formula, they yet fabricate firm form.","author":"John Archibald Wheeler","tags":["acausal","big-bang","cosmology","laws-of-nature","nobel-laureate","origin-of-the-universe","origin-of-universe","physical-law","physics","quantum-cosmology","quantum-fluctuations","quantum-mechanics"],"id":16796,"author_id":"John+Archibald+Wheeler"},{"text":"The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.","author":"Carl Sagan","tags":["cosmology","cosmos","radio-telescopes","space"],"id":19710,"author_id":"Carl+Sagan"},{"text":"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.","author":"Carl Sagan","tags":["awe","cosmology","epistemology","god","organized-religion","religion","science"],"id":21404,"author_id":"Carl+Sagan"},{"text":"One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself.","author":"Lee Smolin","tags":["christian","cosmology","metaphysics","physics","science","theology"],"id":31069,"author_id":"Lee+Smolin"},{"text":"And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don’t even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in you life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means they are so small you don’t have to take them into account when you are calculating something.","author":"Mark Haddon","tags":["astronomy","cosmology","life","science"],"id":37265,"author_id":"Mark+Haddon"},{"text":"Someday they would discover that the stars were not sacred, but made from the same material as their bodies. They would learn it was the stars that created their worlds, that worlds created their minds, that minds created tools, and tools could create stars. Growing, sprawling, thriving until they too became masters of their own understanding, chasing enlightenment with the fervor of having nothing to lose, launching from their homelands like fireworks with glorious yellow tails.","author":"Jake Vander-Ark","tags":["cosmology","creativity","extraterrestrials","globalization","humanism","living-life-to-the-fullest","singularity","technology"],"id":46341,"author_id":"Jake+Vander-Ark"},{"text":"Can Christian preaching expect modern man to accept the mythical view of the world as true? To do so would be both senseless and impossible. It would be senseless, because there is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such. It is simply the cosmology of a pre-scientific age.","author":"Rudolf Karl Bultmann","tags":["christianity","cosmology","mythology"],"id":52518,"author_id":"Rudolf+Karl+Bultmann"},{"text":"As Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, 'The answer to the ancient question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable.' ... In short, the natural state of affairs is something rather than nothing. An empty universe requires supernatural intervention--not a full one. Only by the constant action of an agent outside the universe, such as God, could a state of nothingness be maintained. The fact that we have something is just what we would expect if there is no God.","author":"Victor J. Stenger","tags":["atheism","big-bang-theory","cosmology","divine-intervention","existence","god","miracles","naturalism","new-atheism","physics","religion","skepticism","something-from-nothing","supernaturalism","the-big-bang"],"id":53864,"author_id":"Victor+J.+Stenger"},{"text":"It is possible that these millions of suns, along with thousands of millions more we cannot see, make up altogether but a globule of blood or lymph in the veins of an animal, of a minute insect, hatched in a world of whose vastness we can frame no conception, but which nevertheless would itself, in proportion to some other world, be no more than a speck of dust.","author":"Anatole France","tags":["anthropocenterism","cosmology","life","philosophy","thought","vastness"],"id":68352,"author_id":"Anatole+France"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":83,"pages":9,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}