Notable and Quotable

All scientific research is based on the convictions that the universe is an intelligible, even meaningful, system; that there is a fundamental correspondence between the mind of the investigator and the data being investigated; and that this correspondence is rationality. In consequence, ‘a scientist faced with an apparent irrationality does not accept it as final … He goes on struggling to find some rational way in which the facts can be related to each other … Without that passionate faith in the ultimate rationality of the world, science would falter, stagnate and die …'(1) It is therefore no accident that the pioneers of the scientific revolution were Christians. They believed that the rational God had stamped his rationality both upon the world and upon them.

(1) Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks (SPCK, 1986), p. 70.

—Dr. John R.W. Stott, The Contemporary Christian.