2
" Bet you can't even name one romantic movie you like," she teased.She felt smug when a few minutes went by and Oliver was still unable to name one romantic movie he could profess to enjoy.The Empire Strikes Back," Oliver finally declared, tapping his horn at a Prius that wandered over the line.The Empire Strikes Back? The Star Wars movie? That's not romantic!" Schuyler huffed, fiddling with the air conditioner controls.Au contraire, my dear, it's very romantic. The last scene, you know, when they're about to put Han in that freezing cryogenic chamber or whatever? Remember?" Schuyler mmm-hmmmed.And Leia leans over the ledge and says, 'I love you.'" That's cheesy, not romatic," Schuyler argued, although she did like that part.Let me explain. What's romantic is what Han says back. Remember what he says to her? After she says 'I love you'?" Schuyler grinned. Maybe Oliver had a point. " Han says, 'I know.'" Exactly," Oliver tapped the wheel. " He doesn't have to say anything so trite as 'I love you." Because that's already understood. And that's romantic. "
10
" The percentage of leading scientists who profess not to believe in a personal God tells us little unless we also know on what they base their profession. How much do they know about metaphysics, Christian theology, and intellectual history in relationship to their particular areas of scientific expertise? The intellectual relationship between religion and science is a two-way street. Just as one ought not to place much stock in geological views of a religious believer who has never studied geology, so one ought not to give much credence to the religious views of a scientist who has never studied intellectual history, the philosophy of religion, and theology. The highly specialized character of contemporary academic life makes it perfectly possible to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics, for example, while knowing nothing about the theology of creation, metaphysical univocity, and why they matter for questions pertaining to the reality of God and the character of God's relationship to the natural world. "
― Brad S. Gregory , The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society
11
" People have been on earth in our present form for only about 100,000 years, and in so many ways we’re still ironing out our kinks. These turtles we’ve been traveling with, they outrank us in longevity, having earned three more zeros than we. They’ve got one hundred million years of success on their resume, and they’ve learned something about how to survive in the world. And this, I think, is part of it: they have settled upon peaceful career paths, with a stable rhythm. If humans could survive another one hundred million years, I expect we would no longer find ourselves riding bulls. It’s not so much that I think animals have rights; it’s more that I believe humans have hearts and minds- though I’ve yet to see consistent, convincing proof of either. Turtles may seem to lack sense, but they don’t do senseless things. They’re not terribly energetic, yet they do not waste energy… turtles cannot consider what might happen yet nothing turtles do threatens anyone’s future. Turtles don’t think about the next generation, but they risk and provide all they can to ensure that there will be one. Meanwhile, we profess to love our own offspring above all else, yet above all else it is they from whom we daily steal. We cannot learn to be more like turtles, but from turtles we could learn to be more human. That is the wisdom carried within one hundred million years of survival. What turtles could learn from us, I can’t quite imagine. "
― Carl Safina , Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth's Last Dinosaur
12
" The doctrine of creation of the kind that the Abrahamic faiths profess is such that it encourages the expectation that there will be a deep order in the world, expressive of the Mind and Purpose of that world’s Creator. It also asserts that the character of this order has been freely chosen by God, since it was not determined beforehand by some kind of pre-existing blueprint (as, for example, Platonic thinking had supposed to be the case). As a consequence, the nature of cosmic order cannot be discovered just by taking thought, as if humans could themselves explore a noetic realm of rational constraint to whichthe Creator had had to submit, but the pattern of the world has to be discerned through the observations and experiments that are necessary in order to determine what form the divine choice has actually taken. What is needed, therefore, for successful science is the union of the mathematical expression of order with the empirical investigation of the actual properties of nature, a methodological synthesis of a kind that was pioneered with great skill and fruitfulness by Galileo. "
― John C. Polkinghorne , Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship