By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994)
Context: The gods throw the dice, and they don't ask whether we want to be in the game or not. They don't care if when you go, you leave behind a lover, a home, a career, or a dream. The gods don't care whether you have it all, whether it seems that your every desire can be met through hard work and persistence. The gods don't want to know about your plans and your hopes. Somewhere they're throwing the dice — and you are chosen. From then on, winning or losing is only a question of luck.
The gods throw the dice, freeing love from its cage. And love can create or destroy — depending on the direction of the wind when it is set free.
“Not only does God play dice but… he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.”
During the same 1994 exchange with Penrose as the previous quote, transcribed in The Nature of Space and Time (1996) by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, p. 26 http://books.google.com/books?id=LstaQTXP65cC&lpg=PA26&dq=hawking%20%22where%20they%20can't%20be%20seen%22&pg=PA26#v=onepage&q=&f=false and also in "The Nature of Space and Time" (online text) http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9409195
Unsourced variants: Not only does God play dice with the Universe; he sometimes casts them where they can't be seen.
Not only does God play dice, but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.
Variant: So Einstein was wrong when he said "God does not play dice". Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen.
Switzer on Oklahoma 79-10 defeat of North Texas in 2007. [Another BCS nightmare may be brewing, http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-dufresne10sep10,0,4827957,full.column, LATimes.com, 2007-09-10, 2007-09-10, Chris, Dufresne]
“God does not play dice with the universe.”
Source: The Born-Einstein Letters 1916-55
Source: The Winter of Our Discontent
John Piper Twitter stream http://twitter.com/JohnPiper/statuses/5570283801 (2009-11-09).
“Stop telling God what to do with his dice.”
A response to Einstein's assertion that "God doesn't play dice"; a similar statement is attributed to Enrico Fermi
Disputed
Variant: Einstein, don't tell God what to do.
Variant: Don't tell God what to do with his dice.
Variant: You ought not to speak for what Providence can or can not do. – As described in The Physicists: A generation that changed the world (1981) by C. P. Snow, p. 84
The Mexican-American and the Church (1968)
Context: What do we want the Church to do? We don't ask for more cathedrals. We don't ask for bigger churches of fine gifts. We ask for its presence with us, beside us, as Christ among us. We ask the Church to sacrifice with the people for social change, for justice, and for love of brother. We don't ask for words. We ask for deeds. We don't ask for paternalism. We ask for servanthood.
Source: The Causes of Evolution (1932), Ch. V What is Fitness?, pp. 158-159.
Context: I have given my reasons for thinking that we can probably explain evolution in terms of the capacity for variation of individual organisms, and the selection exercised on them by their environment....
The most obvious alternative to this view is to hold that evolution has throughout been guided by divine power. There are two objections to this hypothesis. Most lines of descent end in extinction, and commonly the end is reached by a number of different lines evolving in parallel. This does not suggest the work of an intelligent designer, still less of an all mighty one. But the moral objection is perhaps more serious. A very large number of originally free-living Crustacea, worms, and so on, have evolved into parasites. In doing so they have lost, to a greater or less extent, their legs, eyes, and brains, and have become in many cases the course of considerable and prolonged pain to other animals and to man. If we are going to take an ethical point of view at all (and we must do so when discussing theological questions), we are, I think, bound to place this loss of faculties coupled with increased infliction of suffering in the same class as moral breakdown in a human being, which can often be traced to genetical causes. To put the matter in a more concrete way, Blake expressed some doubt as to whether God had made the tiger. But the tiger is in many ways an admirable animal. We have now to ask whether God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God.
