Rozey Thorn Trees

“If our highest goal in life is the good of our family, then...we will tend to care less for other families. If our highest goal is the good of our nation, tribe, or race, then we will tend to be racist or nationalistic. If our ultimate goal in life is our own individual happiness, then we will put our own economic and power interests ahead of those of others....[O]nly if God is our summum bonum, our ultimate good and life center, will we find our heart drawn out not only to people of all families, races, and classes, but to the whole world in general.” —Tim Keller in The Reason for God, summarizing Jonathan Edwards’s The Nature of True Virtue, a treatise on social ethics (175).

"When a Russian cosmonaut returned from space and reported that he had not found God, C. S. Lewis responded that this was like Hamlet going into the attic of his castle looking for Shakespeare...." —Tim Keller, The Reason for God (126)

"....The physicist Gerhard Robbins observes that strictly speaking no hypothesis or theory can ever be proven. It can only be disproven. When we say we believe a theory, what we really mean is that we are unable to show that the theory is wrong, not that we are able to show beyond doubt that the theory is right. A scientific theory may stand for years, even centuries, and it may accumulate hundreds of bits of corroborating evidence to support it. If a theory is always vulnerable and a single conflicting finding is all that is required to throw the hypothesis into disarray and call for a new theory, one can never know when such conflicting evidence will arise. Perhaps it will happen tomorrow, perhaps never, but the history of science is strewn with the ruins of mighty edifices toppled by an accident or a triviality...."

"Scientists are very reluctant to ever say that a theory is 'proved.' Even Richard Dawkins admits that Darwin's theory cannot be finally proven, that 'new facts may come to light which will force are successors ... to abandon Darwinism or modify it beyond recognition.' But that doesn't mean that science cannot test theories and find some far more empirically verifiable than others...." —Tim Keller, The Reason for God (125).