Science and the Search for God

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” -Werner Heisenberg 

“In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.” (Heisenberg 1974, 213)^[145]

“Where no guiding ideals are left to point the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaning of our deeds and sufferings, and at the end can lie only negation and despair. Religion is therefore the foundation of ethics, and ethics the presupposition of life.” (Heisenberg 1974, 219).^[146]

Heisenberg was a German Lutheran of Bavaria. As a young man he studied math and science (1920-1923) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the same institution from which Pope Emeritus Benedict has his two Doctorates (1953 and 1957). A couple of the above quotes come from Heisenberg's speech "Scientific and Religious Truth", given upon receiving the Romano Guardini Prize in Munich in 1973.