“The legacy of the great monotheistic religions is the expectation of a single over-arching explanation for the Universe. …There is no logical reason why the Universe should not contain surds of arbitrary elements that do not relate to the rest.”

— John D. Barrow

New Theories of Everything (2007)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The legacy of the great monotheistic religions is the expectation of a single over-arching explanation for the Universe…" by John D. Barrow?

John D. Barrow photo

John D. Barrow58

British scientist 1952–2020

Related quotes

“It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.”

Jorge Luis Borges book The Analytical Language of John Wilkins

As translated by Will Fitzgerald
Other Inquisitions (1952), The Analytical Language of John Wilkins

“Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.”

Ferdinand de Saussure book Course in General Linguistics

Source: Cours de linguistique générale (1916), p. 77
Context: The causes of continuity are a priori within the scope of the observer, but the causes of change in time are not. It is better not to attempt giving an exact account at this point, but to restrict discussion to the shifting of relationships in general. Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.

“If our universe is one of many, unlike others in containing observers like ourselves, there is no need to posit a designer. Most universes will be too chaotic to allow the emergence of life or mind. In that case, the fact that humans exist in this universe needs no special explanation”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Sweet Morality (p. 222)
Source: The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generation beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Introduction <br class="br">1830s, Nature http://www.emersoncentral.com/nature.htm (1836)

“If Vedanta is the "national religion" of India and its universalism at the same time, and if its unique combination of spirituality and reason makes it a philosophical religion, it is to Sankara, after the Upanisadic seers, that the credit should go.”

Govind Chandra Pande (1923–2011) Indian historian

Life and Thought of Sankaracharya (1998)

“The university, vanguard of our struggling people, cannot become a backward element, but it would become so if the university did not incorporate itself into the great plans of the Revolution.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Speech to University students (1959)

“In the particular is contained the universal.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

“There is, therefore, no difficulty in answering such questions as these. What cause was there why the Universe was placed in such a part of Space? and, Why was the Universe created at such a Time? for, if there be no Space beyond the Universe, it was impossible that it should be created in another place; and if there was no Time before, it was impossible it should be created at another time.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

The Mind (begun in September 1723; not completed).

“These universal means of expression were discovered in modern painting by a logical and gradual progress toward ever more abstract form and color. Once the solution was discovered, there followed the exact representation of relations alone, that is to say, of the essential and fundamental element in any plastic emotion of the beautiful.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

1910's, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality', 1919

“My single pair of eyes
Contain the universe they see;
Their mirrored multiplicity
Is packed into a hollow body
Where I reflect the many, in my one.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"The Human Situation"
The Still Centre (1939)

Related topics