“every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. and, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. it really is the most poetic thing i know about physics: you are all stardust.”
― Lawrence M. Krauss
I repeat, the lack of understanding of something is not evidence for God. It’s evidence of a lack of understanding. And what we should do, if we’re scientists, or anyone, is try and say, “Let’s try and understand it before we go the intellectually lazy route of saying, ‘I don’t understand it, so let me assign it to an entity that I can’t understand, a divine entity beyond my comprehension.’” If I did that—If we did that we wouldn’t be in this room today, we wouldn’t be seeing these images because none of modern science would have happened. Instead we try and understand how things work, and the way science works is if there is a physical effect, we look for a physical cause. And so far, there’s not a single place in the history of science where we’ve been, we’ve gotten to a point where we can’t explain something and we know for certain there’s no explanation. Every time something was—every explanation that’s remarkable is remarkable for that fact: it explains something we didn’t think we’d ever understand. That’s the beauty of science.
“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”
― Lawrence M. Krauss
