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This post is a collection of quotes about God. There are 12 quotes divided into 4 sections. The drawing above is by Albrecht Durer titled Praying Hands (1508) .
A. God is a conscious being who created reality (3)
B. Reality was created through magic (4)
C. The creator is conscious because the creator has access to everything that exists its creation (1)
D. God created bad so that good can exist (4)
A. God is a conscious being who created reality
Isaac Newton (1643-1727, physicist):
1. "A heavenly master governs all the world as sovereign of the universe. We are astonished by him by reason of his perfection, we honor him and fall down before him because of his unlimited power." (Quoted in Our Humanist Heritage by George Frater, 2010)
Avicenna (980-1037, physician):
2. "God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, not touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction and his essence cannot change." (Quoted in Readings From Islam by Robert Van der Weyer)
Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854, philosopher):
3. "God, however, as identity of the highest order, remains above all reality and eternally has merely an indirect relationship." (Philosophy and Religion, 1804)
B. Reality was created through magic
James Dobson (1936-now, psychologist):
4. "Try to analyze [God's] omnipotence is like an amoeba attempting to comprehend the behavior of man." (Quoted in On Reading the Bible by Bill Bradfield)
Philolaus (470-385 BC, philosopher):
5. "The essence of things is eternal; it is a unique and divine nature, the knowledge of which does not belong to man." (The Life of Pythagoras)
John Polkinghorne (1930-now, philosopher):
6. "If the physicists seem to achieve their ends more successfully than the theologians, that is simply a reflection of how much easier science is than theology." (Goodreads.com)
Max Weber (1864-1920, philosopher):
7. "The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world." (Science as a Vocation, 1917)
C. The creator is conscious because the creator has access to everything that exists in its creation
Max Planck (1858-1947, physicist):
8. "We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent spirit. This spirit is the matrix of all matter." (The Nature of Matter, 1944)
D. God created bad so that good can exist
Zhuang Zhou (369-286 BC, philosopher):
9. "Division is the same as creation; creation is the same as destruction. There is no such thing as creation or destruction, for these conditions are again levelled together into One." (Zhuangzi)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716, mathematician):
10. "Now as there is an infinity of possible universes in the ideas of God, and as only one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for God's choice, which determines him toward one rather than another." (La Monadologie, 1720 posthumous)
Voltaire (1694-1778, writer):
11. "If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?" (Candide, 1759)
Michelangelo (1475-1564, artist)
12. "Every beauty which is seen here below by persons of perception resembles more than anything else that celestial source from which we all are come." (Quoted in Invitation to Italian Poetry by Luciano Rebay)
