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.

You have had the good fortune to find real teachers, authentic friends, who have taught you everything you wanted to know without holding back. You have had no need to employ any tricks to steal their knowledge, because they led you along the easiest path, even though it had cost them a lot of hard work and suffering to discover it. Now, it is your turn to do the same, with one person, and another — with everyone.

There is no excuse for those who could be scholars and are not.