User blogs

Have you seen the sub-atoms of your body?
No, yet you believe that they exist;
Have you felt the strong force that holds the sub-atoms together?
No, yet you know that they must be there;
Have you seen the atoms of a virus invading your body?
No, yet you have no doubt that they exist.
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Oh my atheist colleagues in science:

Have you seen the Earth on which we reside?
Yes, yet you deny that there was a Builder.
Have you felt the air that you breathe?
Yes, yet you doubt that there is a Provider,
Have you seen your body on which your faculties reside?
Yes, yet you don’t believe that there is a Creator.
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Oh my atheist colleagues in science:

If GOD now reveals how IT breathes life into equations?
Would you still deny that IT exists?
If GOD now reveals how IT designs the laws governing particles?
Would you then still deny that IT’s the basis of natural laws?

If GOD now reveals how IT creates, sustains and makes evolve matters?
Would you still deny that IT’s the foundation of science?

***************************

Oh my atheist colleagues in science:
Time has come for you to search the footprint of Scientific GOD,
Would you rather live in denial?
You are the scientific vessel its Creator would like to hitch a ride,
Would you deny ITS pleasure to do just that?
Through all of us Scientific GOD manifests, Would you rather be in idle?

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ARNO PENZIAS – NOBEL LAUREATE IN PHYSICS

Nobel Prize: Arno Penzias (born 1933) won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, which supported the Big Bang theory of the creation of the Universe.

Nationality: German; later American citizen

Education: Ph.D. in physics, Columbia University, 1962

Occupation: Researcher and Administrator at Bell Laboratories, NJ

1. “If there are a bunch of fruit trees, one can say that whoever created these fruit trees wanted some apples. In other words, by looking at the order in the world, we can infer purpose and from purpose we begin to get some knowledge of the Creator, the Planner of all this. This is, then, how I look at God. I look at God through the works of God’s hands and from those works imply intentions. From these intentions, I receive an impression of the Almighty.” (Penzias, as cited in ‘The God I Believe in’, Joshua O. Haberman - editor, New York, Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994, 184).

2. In an interview published in the anthology 'The God I Believe in' (1994), Penzias talks about his religious views and the Mount Sinai, where God gave the Ten Commandments to the entire Jewish nation – 3 million people:

“Q: You referred before to Sinai. This brings up one of the most complex problems – revelation. Do you think that God revealed Himself at Sinai?

PENZIAS: Or, maybe God always reveals Himself? Again I think as Psalm 19, ‘the heavens proclaim the glory of God,’ that is, God reveals Himself in all there is. All reality, to a greater or lesser extent, reveals the purpose of God. There is some connection to the purpose and order of the world in all aspects of human experience.

Q: When you read or hear the Torah, is it to you the word of Moses or the word of God?

PENZIAS: Well, to me it is the word of Moses and the word of God through Moses.

Q: Then why did Sinai happen?

PENZIAS: I don’t have a good answer, except that Sinai was important for Judaism and important for the future of the world. It was a place where God chose the Jews, but the Jews also chose God. It was a historical moment in which a spiritual connection was made.

Q: Jewish speculations about the hereafter involve the Messiah. Do you believe in such a redeemer or final redemption from all evil here on earth?

PENZIAS: Yes. I believe the world has a purpose, hopefully a good purpose. So I think that a Messiah is necessary to help achieve a purposeful world.” (Penzias, as cited in ‘The God I Believe in’, Joshua O. Haberman - editor, New York, Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994, 188-190).

3. In connection with the Big Bang theory and the issue of the origin of our highly ordered universe, on March 12, 1978, Dr. Penzias stated to the New York Times:

“The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.” (Penzias, as cited in Bergman 1994, 183; see also Brian 1995, 163).

Arno Penzias’ research into astrophysics has caused him to see “evidence of a plan of divine creation” (Penzias, as cited in Bergman 1994, 183).

4. In an interview published in the scientific anthology The Voice of Genius (1995), Dr. Penzias says:

“Penzias: The Bible talks of purposeful creation. What we have, however, is an amazing amount of order; and when we see order, in our experience it normally reflects purpose.

Brian: And this order is reflected in the Bible?

Penzias: Well, if we read the Bible as a whole we would expect order in the world. Purpose would imply order, and what we actually find is order.

Brian: So we can assume there might be purpose?

Penzias: Exactly. …This world is most consistent with purposeful creation.” (Penzias, as cited in Brian 1995, 163-165).

5. In Gordy Slack’s article “When Science and Religion Collide or Why Einstein Wasn’t an Atheist: Scientists Talk about Why They Believe in God” (1997), Dr. Penzias stated: “If God created the universe, he would have done it elegantly. The absence of any imprint of intervention upon creation is what we would expect from a truly all-powerful Creator. You don’t need somebody diddling around like Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz to keep the universe going. Instead, what you have is half a page of mathematics that describes everything. In some sense, the power of the creation lies in its underlying simplicity.” (Penzias, as cited in Slack 1997).

6. Concerning the Big Bang theory and the observational evidence that the universe was created, Penzias pointed out:

“How could the everyday person take sides in this dispute between giants? One held that the universe was created out of nothing, while the other proclaimed the evident eternity of matter. The ‘dogma’ of creation was thwarted by the ‘fact’ of the eternal nature of matter.

Well, today’s dogma holds that matter is eternal. The dogma comes from the intuitive belief of people (including the majority of physicists) who don’t want to accept the observational evidence that the universe was created – despite the fact that the creation of the universe is supported by all the observable data astronomy has produced so far. As a result, the people who reject the data can arguably be described as having a ‘religious’ belief that matter must be eternal. These people regard themselves as objective scientists.” (Penzias, 1983, 3; see also Bergman 1994, 183).

ISIDOR ISAAC RABI – NOBEL LAUREATE IN PHYSICS

Nobel Prize: I. I. Rabi (1898-1988) won the 1944 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei.

Nationality: Austrian; later American citizen

Education: Ph.D. in physics, Columbia University, 1927

Occupation: Professor of Physics at Columbia University (1937-1988)

1. “Physics filled me with awe, put me in touch with a sense of original causes. Physics brought me closer to God. That feeling stayed with me throughout my years in science. Whenever one of my students came to me with a scientific project, I asked only one question, ‘Will it bring you nearer to God?’ ” (I. I. Rabi 1999, Physics Today).

2. “The first verses of Genesis were very moving to me as a kid. The whole idea of the Creation - the mystery and the philosophy of it. It sank in on me, and it’s something I still feel.

There’s no question that basically, somewhere way down, I’m an Orthodox Jew. My early upbringing, so struck by God, the Maker of the world, this has stayed with me.” (Rabi, as cited in John S. Rigden, Rabi: Scientist and Citizen, Harvard University Press, 2000, 21).

3. “Rabi’s Orthodox upbringing had given him a feeling for the mystery of physics, a taste for generalization, and a belief in the profundity and underlying unity of nature.

‘When you’re doing physics, you’re wrestling with a champ,’ he liked to say. ‘You’re trying to find out how God made the world, just like Jacob wrestling with the angel.’ Physics brought Rabi nearer to God because the world was His creation. And like God, physics was infinite and certainly not trivial.” (Brian VanDeMark, Pandora’s Keepers: Nine Men and the Atomic Bomb, Little Brown & Co., 2003, ch. 1).

4. In his article “Isidor Isaac Rabi” (Physics World, November 1999) John Rigden wrote:

“To Rabi, physics, like religion, springs from human aspirations, from the depths of the soul, from deep thinking and deep feeling. For Rabi, doing great physics was walking the path of God.” (Rigden 1999, 31).

NELSON MANDELA – NOBEL PEACE PRIZE LAUREATE

Nobel Prize: The President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela (born 1918) was granted the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize for his resistance against the ruling National Party’s apartheid policies and for his efforts to establish nonracial democracy in South Africa. Mandela was tried for high treason in December 1956, he was jailed for five years in November 1962, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment on June 12, 1964. Mandela was released from prison on February 11, 1990, after 27 years of imprisonment.

Nationality: South African

Education: Law Degree, University of Witwatersrand, 1942; University College of Fort Hare, South Africa

Occupation: President of South Africa, 1994-99 (elected in South Africa’s first all-race elections, 1994)

1. In his speech at the Zionist Christian Church Easter Conference (Moria, 3 April 1994) Nelson Mandela stated:

“We bow our heads in worship on this day and give thanks to the Almighty for the bounty He has bestowed upon us over the past year. We raise our voices in holy gladness to celebrate the victory of the risen Christ over the terrible forces of death.

Easter is a joyful festival! It is a celebration because it is indeed a festival of hope!

Easter marks the renewal of life! The triumph of the light of truth over the darkness of falsehood!

Easter is a festival of human solidarity, because it celebrates the fulfilment of the Good News!

The Good News borne by our risen Messiah who chose not one race, who chose not one country, who chose not one language, who chose not one tribe, who chose all of humankind!

Each Easter marks the rebirth of our faith. It marks the victory of our risen Saviour over the torture of the cross and the grave.

Our Messiah, who came to us in the form of a mortal man, but who by his suffering and crucifixion attained immortality.

Our Messiah, born like an outcast in a stable, and executed like criminal on the cross.

Our Messiah, whose life bears testimony to the truth that there is no shame in poverty: Those who should be ashamed are they who impoverish others.

Whose life testifies to the truth that there is no shame in being persecuted: Those who should be ashamed are they who persecute others.

Whose life proclaims the truth that there is no shame in being conquered: Those who should be ashamed are they who conquer others.

Whose life testifies to the truth that there is no shame in being dispossessed: Those who should be ashamed are they who dispossess others.

Whose life testifies to the truth that there is no shame in being oppressed: Those who should be ashamed are they who oppress others.” (Mandela 1994).

2. “Why is it that in this day and age, human beings still butcher one another simply because they dared to belong to different religions, to speak different tongues, or belong to different races?

Are human beings inherently evil?

What infuses individuals with the ego and ambition to so clamour for power that genocide assumes the mantle of means that justify coveted ends?

These are difficult questions, which, if wrongly examined can lead one to lose faith in fellow human beings. And there is where we would go wrong.

Firstly, because to lose faith in fellow humans is, as the Archbishop would correctly point out, to lose faith in God and in the purpose of life itself.

Secondly, it is erroneous to attribute to the human character a universal trait it does not possess – that of being either inherently evil or inherently humane.

I would venture to say that there is something inherently good in all human beings, deriving from, among other things, the attribute of social consciousness that we all possess. And, yes, there is also something inherently bad in all of us, flesh and blood as we are, with the attendant desire to perpetuate and pamper the self.

From this premise arises the challenge to order our lives and mould our mores in such a way that the good in all of us takes precedence. In other words, we are not passive and hapless souls waiting for manna or the plague from on high. All of us have a role to play in shaping society.” (Mandela 1994b).

3. In another speech at the Zionist Christian Church Easter Conference (Moria, 20 April 1992) Nelson Mandela said:

“May Peace be with you!

We have joined you this Easter in an act of solidarity, and in an act of worship. We have come, like all the other pilgrims, to join in an act of renewal and rededication. The festival of Easter, which is so closely linked with the festival of the Passover, marks the rebirth of the resurrected Messiah,

who without arms,

without soldiers,

without police and covert special forces,

without hit squads or bands of vigilantes,

overcame the mightiest state during his time.

This great festival of rejoicing marks the victory of the forces of life over death, of hope over despair.

We pray with you for the blessings of peace! We pray with you for the blessings of love! We pray with you for the blessings of freedom!” (Mandela 1992; see also Mandela 2003, 332).

4. “Yes! We affirm it and we shall proclaim it from the mountaintops, that all people – be they black or white, be they brown or yellow, be they rich or poor, be they wise or fools, are created in the image of the Creator and are his children!

Those who dare to cast out from the human family people of a darker hue with their racism!

Those who exclude from the sight of God’s grace, people who profess another faith with their religious intolerance!

Those who wish to keep their fellow countrymen away from God’s bounty with forced removals!

Those who have driven away from the altar of God people whom He has chosen to make different, commit an ugly sin! The sin called APARTHEID.” (Mandela 1992; see also Mandela 2003, 332).

SIGRID UNDSET – NOBEL LAUREATE IN LITERATURE

Nobel Prize: Sigrid Undset (1882–1949) was granted the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature “principally for her powerful descriptions of Scandinavian life during the Middle Ages.” Undset donated the prize money to charity.

Nationality: Danish; later Norwegian citizen

Education: Schooling at Kalundborg (Denmark) and Christiania (now Oslo)

Occupation: Novelist and essayist

1. In her famous article “Catholic Propaganda” (February 28, 1927), Sigrid Undset wrote:

“There is no room in the Catholic Church for different concepts about the being of God or about the divine-human nature of Jesus Christ or about the motherhood of the Virgin Mary; because Christ himself is the way to God’s kingdom and because his death on the Cross is the secret which opens God’s kingdom to the descendants of Adam, his blood truly cleanses the sinner from all his sin, his body is truly the food which is the life of believers.” (Undset 1993, in Sigrid Undset: On Saints and Sinners. Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute. Deal W. Hudson – Editor. Volume 6, pp. 232-272. Ignatius Press).

2. In the same article Sigrid Undset wrote about Jesus Christ:

“ ‘He came to his own, and his own did not receive him. But as many as received him, to them he gave power to be the children of God.’ This is the Catholic faith, that an act of the will on the part of man is unconditionally necessary before he can be saved.

By his will, man turned from God; with his will he turns back to him. God pours out his saving grace for us because of love alone and not because in the least measure we have deserved or earned it; the Catholic Church teaches nothing else.” (Undset 1993).

3. In her article “Finding Faith” Undset said: “When people stubbornly hold on to the hope that it is impossible to find any absolute truth, it is because they fancy that life would lose its excitement, would have no freedom, if there really existed one truth – one alone in which all other truths are contained. In this world we can only attain one kind of freedom, that which our Lord spoke of when he said: ‘The truth shall make you free.’ ” (Undset 1999, Vol. 13).

4. “Fear and hope drive the soul forward; they teach it to watch and pray and thus gain a growing knowledge of God – and as a consequence more and more to lose its egoistic concern for itself and to become unselfish, with adoring love for God: this is the fruit which the soul may bring forth at last.” (Undset 1993).

5. “Floating in the infinite personality of God, the human personality rests, an infinitesimal speck in infinity just as the earth is a speck in the part of the universe which our knowledge can comprehend. The earth, men, atoms, become almost equally small when measured against infinity – and each person is as complex as a planet or an atom.” (Undset 1993).

6. “Christianity explains – in unity with other religions – that the invisible infinity is God. He has created all things visible and invisible out of himself and all rests in him. By a special act he has created man in his image – in Catholic theology that means, as white light is broken up by a prism, God’s uncompounded being is broken into human properties.” (Undset 1993).

7. “For Catholics, grace is a medicine which sinners may ever inhale and bathe in, that they might grow up rightly – become saints, be perfect as their heavenly Father is perfect. Only when we are as good as God are we good enough.” (Undset 1993).

“However, there are probably only a few converts who are prepared to explain their own conversion, why their resistance to one who calls himself the Way, the Truth, and the Life, a resistance dictated by fear and mistrust, has been overcome. It does not happen without the cooperation of the mystical and supernatural power that theologians call grace.” (Undset 1999, Vol. 13).

8. “As is well known, no one can be received into the Church without basic instructions – it is not enough to have ‘everyone who wants to be saved, raise your hands’, as I have had the experience of hearing at a revival meeting. The Church does not receive capitulations who only join, after having been momentarily stirred either by intoxicating feelings or emotional worship services; she demands that the convert should know what she teaches and understand what she says. The convert has months, years if he will, to think things over before he takes the step.” (Undset 1993).

“We believe in complete seriousness that the peace of Christ cannot be advanced in the world unless we confess with Peter, literally and without interpretations: ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God!’, and therefore, accept all His words as the word of God.” (Undset 1993).

9. “There is a kind of modern, confused deism, more or less Christian sounding, colored by a kind of Jesus worship that is not worship of God but of a hero. It is prepared all too willingly to enter into company with whatever kind of altruistically colored materialism, without understanding that the Christian and materialistic ideals are incommensurate, even when outwardly they look exactly alike.” (Undset 1993).

10. “By degrees my knowledge of history convinced me that the only thoroughly sane people, of our civilization at least, seemed to be those queer men and women the Catholic Church calls Saints. They seemed to know the true explanation of man’s undying hunger for happiness – his tragically insufficient love of peace, justice, and goodwill to his fellow men, his everlasting fall from grace. Now it occurred to me that there might possibly be some truth in the original Christianity.

But if you desire to know the truth about anything, you always run the risk of finding it. And in a way we do not want to find the Truth – we prefer to seek and keep our illusions.

But I had ventured too near the abode of truth in my researches about ‘God’s friends,’ as the Saints are called in the Old Norse texts of Catholic times. So I had to submit. And on the first of November, 1924, I was received into the Catholic Church.” (Undset, as cited in Grenier 1999).

RONALD ROSS – NOBEL LAUREATE IN MEDICINE AND PHYSIOLOGY

Nobel Prize: Sir Ronald Ross (1857-1932) received the 1902 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for his remarkable work on malaria.

Nationality: British

Education: From 1874 to 1881 he studied medicine at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (London) and the Army Medical School.

Occupation: Professor of Tropical Medicine at Liverpool University (1902-1912); Vice-President of the Royal Society (1911-1913)

1. On August 20, 1897, Sir Ronald Ross made his landmark discovery that malaria is transmitted to people by Anopheles mosquitoes. On that day of discovery he wrote the following poetic words in his Journal:

“This day relenting God

Hath placed within my hand

A wondrous thing; and God

Be praised. At His command,

Seeking His secret deeds

With tears and toiling breath,

I find thy cunning seeds,

O million-murdering Death.

I know this little thing

A myriad men will save.

O Death, where is thy sting?

Thy victory, O Grave?”

(Ronald Ross, Memoirs, London, John Murray, 1923, 226).

Lord, who made high my fate;

For in the mighty small

Thou showed’st the mighty great.

Henceforth I will resound

But praises unto Thee;

Tho’ I was beat and bound,

Thou gavest me victory.”

(Ronald Ross, as cited in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 1975, vol. XI, p. 557, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons).

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (1889-1951), one of the founders of analytic philosophy

According to Encyclopedia Britannica (1997), “Wittgenstein is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.”

1. “To believe in God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.” (Wittgenstein, as cited in Arthur Allen Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr, Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, New York, Free Press, 1988, 567).

2. At one time, Wittgenstein had begun each day by repeating the Lord’s prayer. Concerning this prayer, once he told his friend Maurice Drury:

“It is the most extraordinary prayer ever written. No one ever composed a prayer like it. But remember the Christian religion does not consist in saying a lot of prayers, in fact we are commanded just the opposite. If you and I are to live religious lives it must not just be that we talk a lot about religion, but that in some way our lives are different.” (Wittgenstein, as cited in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, editor – Rush Rhees, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1981, 109).

3. The diaries that Wittgenstein kept during the First World War (in which he was a volunteer) reveal that he often prayed, not that he should be spared from death, but that he should meet it without cowardice and without losing control of himself:

“How will I behave when it comes to shooting? I am not afraid of being shot but of not doing my duty properly. God give me strength! Amen! If it is all over with me now, may I die a good death, mindful of myself. May I never lose myself! Now I might have the opportunity to be a decent human being, because I am face to face with death. May the spirit enlighten me.” (Wittgenstein, as cited in Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, London, Routledge, 1993, 8-9).

4. To Drury he said: “It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.” (Wittgenstein, as cited in Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, London, Routledge, 1993, 20).

5. In 1929 Wittgenstein wrote: “If something is good it is also divine. In a strange way this sums up my ethics. Only the supernatural can express the Supernatural.” (Wittgenstein, as cited in Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, London, Routledge, 1993, 16).

6. Here is a comparison of the Gospels with Paul’s letters: “The spring which flows quietly and transparently through the Gospels seems to have foam on it in Paul’s Epistles. Or, that is how it seems to me. Perhaps it is just my own impurity which sees cloudiness in it; for why shouldn’t this impurity be able to pollute what is clear? But to me it’s as if I saw human passion here, something like pride or anger, which does not agree with the humility of the Gospels. As if there were here an emphasis on his own person, and even as a religious act, which is foreign to the Gospel. In the Gospels – so it seems to me – everything is less pretentious, humbler, simpler. There are huts; with Paul a church. There all men are equal and God himself is a man; with Paul there is already something like a hierarchy; honours and offices. That is, as it were, what my nose tells me.” (Wittgenstein, as cited in Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, London, Routledge, 1993, 16).

7. “WITTGENSTEIN: Drury, what is your favourite Gospel? DRURY: I don’t think I have ever asked myself that question. WITTGENSTEIN: Mine is St. Matthew’s. Matthew seems to me to contain everything. Now, I can’t understand the Fourth Gospel. When I read those long discourses, it seems to me as if a different person is speaking than in the synoptic Gospels. The only incident that reminds me of the others is the story of the woman taken in adultery. ... At one time I thought that the epistles of St. Paul were a different religion to that of the Gospels. But now I see clearly that I was wrong. It is one and the same religion in both the Gospels and the Epistles.” (Wittgenstein, as cited in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, editor – Rush Rhees, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1981, 177-178).

8. “The Christian religion is only for one who needs infinite help, therefore only for one who feels an infinite need. The whole planet cannot be in greater anguish than a single soul. The Christian faith – as I view it – is the refuge in this ultimate anguish. To whom it is given in this anguish to open his heart, instead of contracting it, accepts the means of salvation in his heart.” (Wittgenstein, as cited in Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, London, Routledge, 1993, 17).

9. “Christianity is indeed the only sure way to happiness.” (Wittgenstein, as cited in Monk 1991, 122).

10. “Christianity is not a doctrine; I mean, not a theory about what has happened and will happen with the human soul, but a description of an actual occurrence in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is an actual occurrence, and so are despair and salvation through faith.” (Wittgenstein, as cited in Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, London, Routledge, 1993, 16).

11. “Religious faith and superstition are entirely different. One of them springs from fear and is a kind of false science. The other is a trusting.” (Wittgenstein, as cited in Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, London, Routledge, 1993, 18).

12. Wittgenstein’s biographer and friend, Norman Malcolm wrote: “Wittgenstein’s mature life was strongly marked by religious thought and feeling. I am inclined to think that he was more deeply religious than are many people who correctly regard themselves as religious believers.” (Wittgenstein, as cited in Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, London, Routledge, 1993, 21-22).

13. Two years before his death, Wittgenstein said to Drury:

“I have had a letter from an old friend in Austria, a priest. In it he says he hopes my work will go well, if it should be God’s will. Now that is all I want: if it should be God’s will. Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbuechlein, ‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.’ That is what I would have liked to say about my work.” (Wittgenstein, as cited in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, editor – Rush Rhees, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1981, 181-182).

In their Article "Bridge between Science & Religion", Nadeem Haque & Mehran Banaei take "the route of intelligence, rather than that of chance" and suggest "that Qur’an can be used as a guide and motivator to dissolve the artificial boundary between the sacred and the profane, science and divinity, through a natural rapprochement based on the correlation between causality in nature and pristine revelation. Inevitably, such a rapprochement would further set the stage for transforming human thought towards a unitary understanding of the whole purpose of creation and man’s role within the vastness of cosmic order. In fact, anyone imbued with such an outlook would not be searching for a pristine revelation to act as a bridge between science and religion. That which is one, needs no bridge. Indeed, in this vein of reality, it can certainly be proclaimed that science is truly religion and religion truly science."

In his Essay entitled "Chance or Intelligence?", Nadeem Haque argues "that, if our answer to creation by chance is negative, there can only be a unique governing intelligence." He further suggest that this "vast singular intelligence must have created and developed all living and non-living things, as well as particles/energy and time itself."

In his Essay entitled "Did the Buddha Believe in God?", Nadeem Haque argues "that Buddha, contrary to being an atheist or a person who never answered or avoided answering the question of God’s existence, as some of the present day Buddhist sects and most Western and Eastern scholars portray, also believed in One God."

In their Essay entitled "Meaningless or Purposeful?", Nadeem Haque & Mehran Banaei "reflect as to whether there is a purpose behind the Big Bang, and ask such questions as: what role are we to play, if any, in the realm that has evolved afterwards? Did nature evolve from the Big Bang merely for subservience to Man?"

This issue also contain several poems written by Nadeem Haque under the title "The Magic of Existence."

Huping Hu & Maoxin Wu

November 28, 2011

JOHN RAY (1627-1705), founder of Modern Biology and Natural History

1. In his book The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691), John Ray wrote: “There is no greater, at least no more palpable and convincing Argument of the Existence of a Deity, than the admirable Art and Wisdom that discovers itself in the Make and Constitution, the Order and Disposition, the Ends and Uses of all the Parts and Members of this stately Fabrick of Heaven and Earth.” (Ray 1717, Part I).

2. “There is for a free man no occupation more worth and delightful than to contemplate the beauteous works of nature and honor the infinite wisdom and goodness of God.” (Ray, as cited in Graves 1996, 66; see also Yahya 2002).

3. “We feed our Bodies; our Souls are also to be fed: The Food of the Soul is Knowledge, especially Knowledge in the Things of God, and the Things that concern its Eternal Peace and Happiness - the Doctrine of Christianity, the Word of God read and preached, 1 Pet. ii. 2. ‘As newborn Babes, desire the sincere Milk of the Word, that ye may grow thereby’.” (Ray 1717, 399).

4. “The Life of a Christian is a continual Warfare, and we have potent and vigilant Enemies to encounter withal: the Devil, the World, and this corrupt Flesh we carry about with us.” (Ray 1717, 401).

5. “He that with his Christian Armour manfully fights against and repels the Temptations and Assaults of his Spiritual Enemies, he that keeps his Garments pure, and his Conscience void of Offence towards God and towards Man, shall enjoy perfect Peace here, and Assurance for ever.” (Ray 1717, 402).

Ray’s major theological works are A Persuasive to a Holy Life (1700) and the three Physico-Theological Discourses (1692).