The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
Context: Many religions lay out a set of precepts... and claim that these instructions were given by a god or gods. For example, the first code of law by Hammurabi of Babylon... was handed to him by the god Marduk... this is a bamboozle... a pious hoax.... if Hammurabi had merely said, "Here's what I think everybody should do," he would have been much less successful...
Annotations to Morga's Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas - translated by Austin Craig
“Precepts may instruct, but examples persuade.”
Heaven On Earth, 1654
“Præcepta docent, exempla movent, Precepts may instruct, but examples do persuade.”
London's Lamentations
“All things are but masks at God's beck and call,
They are symbols that instruct us that God is all.”
As translated by Raficq Abdulla
The Conference of the Birds (1177)
Sermon (1899)
Variant translation: We conclude that God is known first through Nature, and then again, more particularly, by doctrine; by Nature in His works, and by doctrine in His revealed word.
Book I, Chapter XVIII.—Notwithstanding Their Conceits, the God of the Marcionites Fails in the Vouchers Both of Created Evidence and of Adequate Revelation.
This was quoted by Galileo in his defense of natural sciences.
Galileo Galilei: Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, 1615 https://people.bu.edu/dklepper/RN242/duchess.html
Against Marcion https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0312.htm
Original: (la) Digna enim deo probabunt deum. Nos definimus deum primo natura cognoscendum, deinde doctrina recognoscendum, natura ex operibus, doctrina ex praedicationibus.
“God, who has given me so many Kingdoms to govern, has not given me a son fit to govern them.”
David Maland, Europe in the seventeenth century (1966), p. 207.
