Keith Ward

God, Chance and Necessity

"To the majority of those who have reflected deeply and written about the origin and nature of the universe, it has seemed that it points beyond itself to a source which is non-physical and of great intelligence and power. Almost all of the great classical philosophers - certainly Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibnez, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel,Locke, Berkeley - saw the origin of the universe as lying in a transcendent reality. They had different specific ideas of this reality, and different ways of approaching it; but that the universe is not self-explanatory, and that it requires some explanation beyond itself, was something they accepted as fairly obvious. " p1

"The continuing conformity of physical particles to precise mathematical relationships is something that is much more likely to exist if there is an ordering cosmic mathematician who sets up the correlation in the requisite way. The existence of laws of physics ... strongly implies that there is a God who formulates such laws and ensures that the physical realm conforms to them."

"Is Religion Dangerous?"

"If there is a root of evil that became a terrifying force that almost brought the world to destruction in the first half of the twentieth century, it is the anti-religious ideologies of Germany and Russia, North Vietnam, and North Korea. It takes almost willful blindness to invert this historical fact, and to suppose that the religions that were persecuted and crushed by these brutal forces are the real sources of evil in the world." p40

Quoted by John Lennox in Gunning for God, p79
Cited by Turek on p122 of Stealing from God