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1 " Right now there's a commonly-held view among scientists that we know about only four percent of all the matter in the universe. Four percent!" " So what about the other 96 percent?" " We astrophysicists call it 'dark matter' and 'dark energy.' Maybe we should just call it ignorance. There's so much that we don't know. It's shocking how little we know. And yet we behave like little gods who think we're in control of everything. Like kids with delusions of grandeur. Isn't that what we've made ourselves into? It's as if we're trying to make ourselves believe that four percent is all there is. That everything else, all that we don't know, doesn't exist. But it does. We know it's there; we just don't understand it. "
2 " Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and become a plastic world.. It goes deeper than its visual manifestations, it affects moral matters; we are engaged, as astrophysicists would say, on a decaying orbit. "
3 " Don't most astrophysicists now predict some " end of the line" - an end to it all? Not just the death of things, but the annihilation of everything. Some great contraction, or collapse. Or, perhaps, some vast dissipation into eternal emptiness. Maybe it's all swallowed up by an immense black hole, which then swallows itself. But, whatever the case, their extinction is inevitable and absolute. So complete as to erase any and all evidence that this reality - this existence - ever took place. So complete that, perhaps, for all intents and purposes, it never really did. (attrib: F.L. Vanderson) "
4 " Winning the Origins Lottery Nontheistic models adhere to a central premise that humans arose by strictly natural unguided steps from a bacterial life-form that sprang into being 3.8 billion years ago. Famed evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, an advocate for the hypothesis that natural selection and mutations can efficiently generate distinctly different species, nevertheless calculated the probability that humans (or a similarly intelligent species) arose from single-celled organisms as a possibility so small (10-1,000,000) that it might as well be zero (roughly equivalent to the likelihood of winning the California lottery 150,000 consecutive times with the purchase of just one ticket each time).2 He and other evolutionary biologists agree that natural selection and mutations could have yielded any of a virtually infinite number of other outcomes. Astrophysicists Brandon Carter, John Barrow, and Frank Tipler produced an even smaller probability. "
― Hugh Ross , More Than a Theory: Revealing a Testable Model for Creation
5 " Some astrophysicists have convinced themselves that the fifth significant figure of the fine structure constant has changed over the past ten billion years. "
― Sheldon L. Glashow
