A ROCKET SCIENTIST TELLS IT LIKE IT IS

Robert Jastrow, an astrophysicist, former Director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard   Institute, in his book God and the Astronomers, writes,

“At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

 

 

 

“Our number one problem is a faulty concept of God.”

“At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

 ”Try imagine nothing exists. There is no sun, no moon, no stars, and no galaxies. There are no elements such as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, or oxygen. There are no such things as time, space, matter or energy. There is no universe, no God, nothing.  Since we know that nothing comes from nothing, we are forced to the inescapable conclusion that, if there ever was a time when nothing existed, then nothing would exist now. Therefore something must be eternal.  You only have two choices: either God is eternal and uncreated, or matter is eternal and uncreated. There is no third option. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity provided a basis for proof that time; space and matter had a definite beginning. That leaves us with our only other option.

“A study was done a while back into all the famous atheists of history, Jean Paul Sartre, Camus, Friedrich Nietzche, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, and every single one of them had something in common. They either lost their father when they were young, their father abandoned their family, or they had a terrible relationship with their father. That is very interesting because often these doubts aren’t really driven by intellectual questions; they are being driven by an emotional issue that really blocks them from wanting to relate to a heavenly father because they feel so abandoned, or cheated, or hurt by their earthly father.”

The famous atheist Aldous Huxley speaks for all atheists (whether they like it or not) in this priceless quote: “I had motives for not wanting the world to have mean­ing; consequently assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption … The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem of pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself as no doubt for most of my con­temporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a cer­tain system of morality. We objected to the morality be­cause it interfered with our sexual freedom.”

“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

“If anything now exists, either something is eternal, or no one, plus nothing equals, everything.”

“Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the thought of identifying themselves with Jesus Christ and admitting they are sinners.”

“Buddha never claimed to be God. Moses never claimed to be Jehovah. Mohammed never claimed to be Allah. Yet Jesus Christ claimed to be the true and living God. Buddha simply said, “I am a teacher in search of the truth.” Jesus said, “I am the Truth.” Confucius said, “I never claimed to be holy.” Jesus said, “Who convicts me of sin?” Mohammed said, “Unless God throws his cloak of mercy over me, I have no hope.” Jesus said, “Unless you believe that I Am, you will die in your sins.”

The Pharisees tried to trip Jesus up all the time with intellectual mind games. They, however, were more interested in heat than in light. Their primary concern was not truth, but in protecting their love affair with the world. Nothing has changed, people know that to acknowledge Jesus is to renounce the world, and that is too high a price for many, so they look for ways to justify their unbelief.

 

“As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene….No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”

“God exists whether or not men may choose to believe in Him.  The reason why many people do not believe in God is not so much that it is intellectually impossible to believe in God, but because belief in God forces that thoughtful person to face the fact that he is accountable to such a God.”

“Still, even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics. This is why, when pressed, the atheist will often attempt to hide his lack of conviction in his own beliefs behind some poorly formulated utilitarianism, or argue that he acts out of altruistic self-interest. But this is only post-facto rationalization, not reason or rational behavior.”

“The atheist can appeal to nothing absolute, nothing objectively true for all people, it is just mere opinion enforced by might. The Christian appeals to a standard outside himself/herself in which truth and qualitative values can be made sense of.”

“The most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”

“According to PhD astrophysicists and qualified American science professors, the odds of the more than 2,500 prophecies found in the Bible being fulfilled by chance are 1 with 2,000 zeros after it. According to the mathematical science of probability, if a number has more than 50 zeros after it, the odds of that happening by chance is virtually impossible. This is irrefutable proof that the Bible is inspired by God!”

“I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.”

“The best defense that anyone can have against the wiles of the devil is a humble heart”: “Nothing sets a person so much out of Satan’s reach as humility.” Humility is a great protection against falling headlong into Satan’s trap. Besides, it is hard to fall down when you are already prostrate before God.”

“Grace is the divine influence upon the heart, and its reflection in the life; including gratitude. 1) Good will, loving-kindness, favor; used of the merciful kindness by which God, exerting His holy influence upon souls, turns them to Christ, keeps, strengthens, increases them in Christian faith, knowledge, affection, and kindles them to the exercise of Christian virtue. 2) The spiritual condition of one governed  by the power of divine grace.”

“I was at this time of living, like so many Atheists or Anti-theists, in a whirl of contradictions.  I maintained that God did not exist.  I was also very angry with God for not existing.  I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.”

Speaking of the testimony of the Apostles to the resurrection of Jesus: “… As one after another was put to a miserable death, the survivors only prosecuted their work with increased vigor and resolution. The annals of military warfare afford scarcely an example of the like heroic constancy, patience, and unblenching courage. They had every possible motive to review carefully the grounds of their faith, and the evidences of the great facts and truths which they asserted; and these motives were pressed upon their attention with the most melancholy and terrific frequency. It was therefore impossible that they could have persisted in affirming the truths they have narrated, had not Jesus actually risen from the dead, and had they not known this fact as certainly as they knew any other fact. If it were morally possible for them to have been deceived in this matter every human motive operated to lead them to discover and avow their error. To have persisted in so gross a falsehood, after it was known to them, was not only to encounter, for life, all the evils which man could inflict, from without, but to endure also the pangs of inward and conscious guilt; with no hope of future peace, no testimony of a good conscience, no expectation of honor or esteem among men, no hope of happiness in this life, or in the world to come.”

 

“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?… Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist – in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless – I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality – namely my idea of justice – was full of sense. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning:  just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”

“We must recognize that this country is close to being lost. Not first of all because of a humanist conspiracy, but because the Bible believing Christians in the last 40 years who have said that they know that the final reality is this infinite personal God, who is the Creator, they said they have known it, and they have done nothing about it. As the consensus has changed, there has been a vast silence.”

“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven…but we have forgotten God……and we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own”. “Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become… too proud to pray to the God that made us. The only assurance of our national safety is to lay our foundation in morality and religion. To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men”

 

“The chief danger of the Twentieth Century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God . . .  and heaven without hell.”

“Someone once said that if you sat a million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years, one of them would eventually type out all of Hamlet by chance. But when we find the text of Hamlet, we don’t wonder whether it came from chance and monkeys. Why then does the atheist use that incredibly improbable explanation for the universe? Clearly, because it is his only chance of remaining an atheist. At this point we need a psychological explanation of the atheist rather than a logical explanation of the universe.”

“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”

“The odds of life originating by accident are the same odds as an unabridged dictionary resulting from an  explosion in a printing shop. For life as we know it, to originate by chance would be the same odds as a monkey producing an encyclopedia by randomly pushing the keys on a typewriter!”

“Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.”

“No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that ‘In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth’.”

“Karl Marx said man is not responsible for his own behavior because his behavior is economically pre-determined. Sigmund Freud said man is not responsible for his own behavior because his behavior is pre-natally pre-determined. Charles Darwin said man is not responsible for his own behavior because his behavior is genetically pre-determined. John Dewey said man is not responsible for his actions, because they are educationally pre-determined. Jean Dixon said man is not responsible for the way he is because it’s astrologically pre-determined. Sociologists say it’s not your fault, it’s your environment. God says men are without excuse.”.

“The rest of the scriptures are but a commentary on the Ten Commandments, either exciting us to obedience by arguments, alluring us by promises, or restraining us from transgressions by threatenings. Rightly understood, the precepts of the New Testament are but explications, amplifications and applications of the Ten Commandments.”

“I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.”

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

“Everything in Christianity is connected more or less directly with the great facts of Sin and Redemption; and the plan of Redemption. The essence of Christianity cannot be rightly understood until the doctrine of Sin be adequately recognized and established.”

“It is impossible to enslave mentally or socially a Bible-reading people. The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom.”

“The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator.”

“A church which does not exist to do good in the slums of a city is a church that has no reason to justify its longer existence-Not for yourself church do you exist any more than Christ existed for Himself His glory was that He laid aside His glory, and the glory of the church is when she lays down her respectability and her dignity and counts it to be her glory to gather together the out casts, and her highest honor to seek amid the foulest mire the priceless jewels for which Jesus shed His blood.”

“Maybe the atheist cannot find God for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman.”

An utterly fascinating illustration of this duping of ourselves is the latest arts building opened at Ohio State University, the Wexner Center for the Performing Arts, another one of our chimerical exploits in the name of intellectual advance.  Newsweek branded this building “America’s first deconstructionist building.”  It’s white scaffolding, red brick turrets, and Colorado grass pods evoke a double take.  But puzzlement only intensifies when you enter the building, for inside you encounter stairways that go nowhere, pillars that hang from the ceiling without purpose, and angled surfaces configured to create a sense of vertigo.  The architect, we are duly informed, designed this building to reflect life itself-senseless and incoherent-and the “capriciousness of the rules that organize the built world.”  When the rationale was explained to me, I had just one question: Did he do the same with the foundation?

The laughter in  response to my question unmasked the double standard our deconstructionists espouse.  And that is precisely the double standard of atheism!  It is possible to dress up and romanticize our bizarre experiments in social restructuring while disavowing truth or absolutes. But one dares not play such deadly games with the foundations of good thinking.

“God gave you two ears and one mouth so you could listen twice as much as you talk. He could have given you two mouths, one on each side of your head and one ear in the middle of your forehead so you could talk to two people at the same time. Notice also the distinct difference between the mouth and the ear. The ears are always open, always ready to receive instruction. But for the mouth, God provided three lines of defense to keep it shut. The tongue is completely surrounded with a double row of sharp teeth, above and beneath. It also has two powerful jaws, and two lips, capable of being tightly compressed in order to keep that little two ounce piece of flesh from causing any more trouble.”

 

“At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

“Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.”

“…the real discoveries of science — as opposed to the materialist philosophy that has been imposed upon science – point straight towards the reality of intelligent causes in biology. When you realize that fact, then you are ready to recognize that there are two definitions of “science” in our culture. One definition says that scientists follow the evidence regardless of the philosophy; the other says that scientists must follow the (materialist) philosophy regardless of the evidence.”

“The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words ‘true’ or ‘false’.”

“I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.”

“It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible”

“What will matter when this life is over? Wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away. It will not matter where you came from, what your skin color or gender. It will not matter what you bought but what you built. Not how much you made but how much you gave. Not how much you learned but how much you taught. It’s not competence but character that will count. What will matter is what you did with what you had. Every act of integrity, compassion, courage, or sacrifice that enriched, empowered, or encouraged others to emulate the example of Jesus Christ, that is what will be rewarded throughout eternity.”

“There is only one great Book among all the religions of the world that makes any attempt to predict the future in all its ramifications. That Book is the Bible, which not only contains thousands of words of prophecy, but also stands alone as the only book divinely inspired. It is indeed a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our pathway.”

“The whole treasury of God will be made over by deed of gift to the soul that is humble enough to be able to receive it without growing proud because of it. God blesses us all up to the full measure of what is safe for Him to do. If you do not get a blessing, it is because it is not safe for you to have one.”