#cosmology

"There's no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. We don't think this is merely coincidental. It cries out for another explanation, an explanation that... points to purpose and intelligent design in the cosmos."

"Some piously record 'In the beginning God', but I say 'In the beginning hydrogen'."

"The unity of scientific and spiritual knowledge is realized when each of the particular sciences is organically related to the supreme knowledge of al-tawhid."

"It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!"

"One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself."

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

"The sun symbolizes the Divine intelligence; the empty vastness of space symbolizes the Divine All-Possibility and also the Divine immutability; a bird symbolizes the soul; a tree symbolizes the grades of being; and water symbolizes knowledge and rain revelation."

"It is possible that these millions of suns, along with thousands of millions more we cannot see, make up altogether but a globule of blood or lymph in the veins of an animal, of a minute insect, hatched in a world of whose vastness we can frame no conception, but which nevertheless would itself, in proportion to some other world, be no more than a speck of dust."

"All what we think and know is an illusion. Nothing exists. Everything is an opinion."

"The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the starsDid wander darkling in the eternal space."

"Something deeply hidden had to be behind things."

"My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer."

"A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being?"

"I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship."

"It’s hard to build models of inflation that don't lead to a multiverse. It’s not impossible, so I think there’s still certainly research that needs to be done. But most models of inflation do lead to a multiverse, and evidence for inflation will be pushing us in the direction of taking [the idea of a] multiverse seriously."