"God and the New Physics" by Paul Davies

• Science and religion represent two great systems of human thought. For the majority of people on our planet, religion is the predominant influence over the conduct of their affairs.
• If religion has been displaced from people’s consciousness, it has certainly not been replaced by rational scientific thought.
• If the Church is largely ignored today it is not because science has finally won its age-old battle with religion, but because it has so radically reoriented our society that the biblical perspective of the world now seems largely irrelevant.
• The world’s major religions, founded on received wisdom and dogma, are rooted in the past and do not cope easily with changing times.
• The vast majority of people do not understand scientific principles, nor are they interested.
• Lip service may be paid to the importance of science and rational thought for ordering our society, but at the personal level most people still find religious doctrine more persuasive than scientific arguments.
• We live in a world that, in spite of appearances, is still fundamentally religious.
• No religion that bases its beliefs on demonstrably incorrect assumptions can expect to survive very long.
• It is ironical that although most religious extol the virtues of love, peace and humility, it is all too often hatred, war and arrogance that characterize the history of the world’s great religious organizations.
• The early attempts by the Church to hold back the floodgates of scientific advance have left a deep suspicion of religion among the scientific community. For their part, scientists have demolished a lot of cherished religious beliefs and have come to be regarded by many as faith-wreckers.
• Religion is founded on revelation and received wisdom.
• The trouble about revealed ‘Truth’ is that it is liable to be wrong, and even if it is right other people require a good reason to share the recipient's’ belief.
• Either the universe has always existed (in one form or another) or it began, more or less abruptly, at some particular moment in the past.
• The universe will eventually die, wallowing, as it were, in its own entropy. This is known among physicists as the ‘heat death’ of the universe.
• The universe cannot have existed for ever, otherwise it would have reached its equilibrium end state an infinite time ago. Conclusion: the universe did not always exist.
• Stars form, along with planets, as a result of the gradual contraction and fragmentation of huge, tenuous clouds of interstellar gas which consist mainly of hydrogen.
• The force of gravity powers all large-scale cosmic phenomena.
• The first instant of the big bang, where space was infinitely shrunken, represents a boundary or edge in time at which space ceases to exist. Physicists call such a boundary a singularity.
• To the physicist ‘nothing’ means ‘no space’ as well as no matter.
• Space is inextricably linked to time, and as space stretches and shrinks, so does time.
• By employing mathematics as a language, science can describe situations which are completely beyond the power of human beings to imagine.
• Failure of the human imagination to grasp certain crucial features of reality is a warning that we cannot expect to base great religious truths (such as the nature of the creation) on simple-minded ideas of space, time and matter, gleaned from daily experience.
• Hydrogen and helium together constitute over ninety-nine percent of the material in the universe.
• When antimatter encounters matter, the two annihilate each other with a violent release of energy -- the reverse process of matter creation.
• The cosmological argument is founded on the assumption that everything requires a cause, yet ends in the conclusion that at least one thing (God) does not require a cause.
• Today we know that time is linked inseparably to space, and that space-time is as much a part of the physical universe as matter.
• We may say that God is not so much a cause of the universe as an explanation.
• Atoms do not need to be ‘animated’ to yield life, they simply have to be arranged in the appropriate complex way.
• The earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. Traces of developed life exist in the fossil record back to at least 3.5 billion years, and presumably some form of primitive life existed before this.
• In an infinite universe, anything that is possible must happen somewhere by pure chance.
• The existence of extraterrestrial intelligences would have a profound impact on religion, shattering completely the traditional perspective of God’s special relationship with man.
• At the neural (brain cell) level, the human brain is equally mechanical and subject to rational principles, yet this does not prevent us from experiencing feelings of indecision, confusion, happiness, boredom and irrationality.
• The materialist believes that mental states and operations are nothing but physical states and operations. At the other extreme is the philosophy of idealism which asserts that it is the physical world that does not exist; everything is perception.
• Axioms are the things you assume are true without proof (e.g. 1=1).
• There seems to be no scientific evidence for any special divine quality in man, and no fundamental reason is apparent why an advanced electronic machine should not, in principle, enjoy similar feelings of consciousness as ourselves.
• You can’t know where an atom, or electron, or whatever, is located and know how it is moving, at one and the same time.
• Einstein demonstrated that time is, in fact, elastic and can be stretched and shrunk by motion.
• Equally extraordinary effect afflict space, which is also elastic.
• When time is stretched, space is shrunk.
• The mutual distortions of space and time can be regarded as a conversion of space (which shrinks) into time (which stretches).
• The strong force glues the nuclear particles together, but there is also a very much weaker force. The weak force is responsible for causing some of the unstable nuclear particles to decay.
• The underlying assumption of the quark theory is that the quarks themselves are truly structureless, fundamental particles -- point-like objects with no internal parts.
• Leptons feel the weak force, quarks feel the strong force.
• Subatomic particles can be divided into two broad classes: leptons and quarks. Quarks are not found individually, but united in groups of two or three; they have fractional electric charge.
• Evolution of biological order by mutation and natural selection is now accepted virtually unanimously by scientists and theologians alike.
• However persuasive they may seem, arguments for the existence of God based on cosmology or suggestions of design in the natural world, are at best indirect.
• The ability of the scientific method to accommodate change in the light of new discoveries represents one of science’s great strengths.
• Religion is founded on dogma and received wisdom, which purports to represent immutable truth.