Certainly you have among your philosophers men who maintain that this world is without a beginning and was not created. But a majority, almost all even of the heresies, allow it a beginning and a maker, and ascribe its creation to God. Firmly believe, therefore, that He made it wholly out of nothing, and by believing that He has such powers, you will have found the knowledge of God.

I conclude from the existence of these accidents of physics and astronomy that the universe is an unexpectedly hospitable place for living creatures to make their home in. Being a scientist, trained in the habits of thought and language of the twentieth century rather than the eighteenth, I do not claim that the architecture of the universe proves the existence of God. I claim only that the architecture of the universe is consistent with the hypothesis that mind plays an essential role in its functioning.

The concept of law is so well established in science that until recently few scientists stopped to think about the nature and origin of these laws; they were happy to simply accept them as "given." Now that physicists and cosmologists have made rapid progress toward finding what they regard as the "ultimate" laws of the universe, many old questions have resurfaced. Why do the laws have the form they do? Might they have been otherwise? Where do these laws come from? Do they exist independently of the physical universe?

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? the usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother for existing?

The meaning of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists — and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is contingent. What makes it non-contingent cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be contingent. It must lie outside the world.

“Why is there so much beauty in nature?” We do not believe that beauty is only in the eye of the beholder. There are objective features underlying at least some experiences of beauty, such as the frequency ratios of the notes of a major chord, the symmetry of geometric forms, or the aesthetic appeal of juxtaposed complementary colors. None of these have survival value, but all are prevalent in nature in a measure hardly compatible with chance.

Those thinkers are absolutely mistaken, therefore, who imagine they can prove man’s nature to be purely material simply by uncovering ever deeper and more numerous roots of his being in the earth. Far from annihilating spirit, they merely show how it mingles with and acts upon the world of matter like a leaven. Let us not play their game by supposing as they do that for a being to come from heaven we must know nothing of the earthly conditions of his origin.

It is scientists and theologians that need to be brought together, not merely science and theology.

Since we astronomers are Priests of the Most High God with respect to the Book of Nature, it behooves us that we do not aim at the glory of our own spirit, but above everything else at the glory of God.

The Holy Scripture and Nature equally proceed from the divine Word, the former as the dictation of the Holy Ghost and the latter as most observant executrix of God’s command.