216 Quotes About Cosmology

God is the God of the entire cosmos; God has to do with every creature, and every creature has to do with God, whether they recognize it or not.

[T]hese people lived close to the ground, if you will, and the natural world filled their lives. Creation was a lived reality for them prior to the development of specific ideas about creation.

[C]reation" is not simply viewed as a matter of origination or a divine activity chronologically set only "in the beginning.

God works creatively with already existing realities to bring about newness. This understanding also entails the idea that the present (and future) is not wholly determined by the past; God does bring the "new" into existence. [...] God also creates in and through creaturely activity.

[T]he creativity of the human creature is such that genuinely new realities are regularly brought into being.

That the epic journey of Homo sapiens has taken us from the savannah to space is indisputable, but we do not have one simple, comprehensive account of this multigenerational sojourn—and we never will, no matter how much we excavate. Rather, we have grainy snapshots, faded sketches, souvenirs of mysterious purpose, maps of unspecified scales drawn long after the fact, and stories which change with each storyteller and occasion.

Reality, truth, and knowledge are matters about which there is less consensus than one might hope.

Culture influences our understanding of the world. Our biological perception equipment is influenced by our mental constructions; we do not simply ‘see the world as it is,’ either in the literal sense of vision or in the metaphorical sense of overall apprehension. Our explanations for the patterns we observe are produced in part by what we are taught about the rules of causation, i.e., ‘how the world works.

What is crucial here, however, is this anthropological point: that contemporary science is as cultural as shamanism, opera, Catholicism, or the Boy Scouts. It does not stand outside of culture in a space of perfect objectivity.