4 Stephen Jay Gould Quotes on Faith

Stephen Jay Gould quotes on faith

1. We should therefore, with grace and optimism, embrace NOMA's tough-minded demand: Acknowledge the personal character of these human struggles about morals and meanings, and stop looking for definite answers in nature's construction. But many people cannot bear to surrender nature as a 'transitional object'-a baby's warm blanket for our adult comfort. But when we do (for we must), nature can finally emerge in her true form: not as a distorted mirror of our needs, but as our most fascinating companion. Only then can we unite the patches built by our separate magisteria into a beautiful and coherent quilt called wisdom.

95. Details are all that matters: God dwells there, and you never get to see Him if you don't struggle to get them right.

144. A very sincere and serious freshman student came to my office with a question that had clearly been troubling him deeply. He said to me, 'I am a devout Christian and have never had any reason to doubt evolution, an idea that seems both exciting and well documented. But my roommate, a proselytizing evangelical, has been insisting with enormous vigor that I cannot be both a real Christian and an evolutionist. So tell me, can a person believe both in God and in evolution?' Again, I gulped hard, did my intellectual duty, and reassured him that evolution was both true and entirely compatible with Christian belief-a position that I hold sincerely, but still an odd situation for a Jewish agnostic.

179. In all my years of teaching with Steve, I have never seen him flustered or at a loss for words-except once. In our course entitled 'Thinking About Thinking,' he had been presenting a lecture on the randomness of nature and referred to Einstein's famous dictum 'I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.' I responded by walking up to the blackboard and writing, 'Gould or God?' I then argued that if God does not play dice with the universe, as Einstein said, and if the universe is as random as the throws of honest dice, as Gould says, then there could not be a God. Hence, Gould or God? (Or at the very least, Gould or Einstein?) Then I sat down, leaving it to Steve to answer the challenge. He stood up and looked at the words on the blackboard. He hesitated, gathered his thoughts, and then launched into a defense of God so brilliant that even William Jennings Bryan would have been proud. It was then that I realized what a great lawyer Gould would make. As for God... ?