Centuries of Search

“….A time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject….And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them……Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced. Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate……Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all.”
Seneca, Natural Questions, Book 7,(first century AD)

“……Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised and should be rejected.
If God created the world, where was he before creation?........How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression……
Know that the world was uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end.”
The Mahapurana, The Great Legend, Jinsena, India, Ninth century

“…….we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens……The diversity
of the phenomena of Nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking for fresh nourishment.”
Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum

“……If a faithful account was rendered of Man’s ideas upon Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word “gods” has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of the natural, the source of known causes, ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing to his gods……When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon…..does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?”
Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Baron von Holbach, Système de la Nature, London, 1770

“…….Probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from one primordial form, into which life was first breathed…… There is grandeur in this view of life…..that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859

“…….We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times – a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universes……How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor.”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos - The Book, (p.275), New York, 1985