So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have existed thro’ all time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe

So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have existed thro’ all time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe. Surely this unanimous sentiment renders this more probable than that of the few in the other hypothesis.

Letter of Thomas Jefferson: 1743-1826 to John Adams Monticello, April 11, 1823

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This is the great paradox that modern science poses, that the more we know, the more mysterious the universe becomes

This is the great paradox that modern science poses, that the more we know, the more mysterious the universe becomes. For example, we have the Big Bang theory…But where did the universe come from in the first place – where did the Big Bang comes from? Where did the laws of nature, of physics come from?

John Horgan, in Melvyn Bragg, On Giants’ Shoulders, pp.341-2

Life does not come from non-life

Simple statistics soon reveal that the possibility of the spontaneous assembly of DNA…as a result of random concatenations of the (primordial) soup molecules is ludicrously…small…the chance of the right one cropping up by blind chance is virtually zero.

Paul Davis (non-Christian) professor of theoretical physics, Newcastle, God and the New Physics, Penguin, 1983, pp68-69

And it would be blind chance (natural selection not in operation in the primordial soup) for the right molecules to come together. Life does not come from non-life.

Naturalism of La Mettrie

Not that I call in question the existence of a supreme being; on the contrary it seems to me that the greatest degree of probability is in favor of this belief. But since the existence of this being goes no further than that of any other toward proving the need of worship, it is a theoretic truth with very little practical value. Therefore, since we may say, after such long experience, that religion does not imply exact honesty, we are authorized by the same reasons to think that atheism does not exclude it.

Let us not lose ourselves in the infinite, for we are not made
to have the least idea thereof, and are absolutely unable to get back to the origin of things. Besides it does not matter for our peace of mind, whether matter be eternal or have been created, whether there be or be not a God. How foolish to torment ourselves so much about things which we can not know, and which would not make us any happier even were we to gain knowledge about them !

I do not take either side.

La Mettrie

Note
Julien Offray de La Mettrie (December 19, 1709 – November 11, 1751) was a French physician and philosopher, and one of the earliest of the French materialists of the Enlightenment. He is best known for his work L’homme machine (“Machine man”[1]), wherein he rejected the Cartesian dualism of mind and body, and proposed the metaphor of the human being as machine. Wikipedia

This work of La Mettrie’s denies the soul in man.