Faith & Spirit Quote by Martin Gardner

Gardner’s move here is a magician’s misdirection executed with a mathematician’s calm: he accepts the mechanistic picture of reality that skeptics often wield as a club against religion, then flips it into a defense of theological possibility. Particles and waves, “dancing” to laws, is physics as choreography - impersonal, elegant, and, crucially, already astonishing. If you can grant a cosmos that runs on equations, he asks, why draw the line at biology as though life were a special exemption that would embarrass God?

The intent isn’t to “prove” God; it’s to puncture a certain smug certainty. Gardner is targeting the argument that natural law crowds out divine action. His subtext is compatibilist: laws are not handcuffs on a creator but tools a creator could plausibly choose. Evolution, chemistry, and emergence become not rivals to divinity but potential instruments. That “who are we” isn’t piety so much as a rhetorical check on human arrogance, especially the kind that mistakes current scientific explanation for metaphysical closure.

Context matters: Gardner spent a career popularizing math and debunking pseudoscience, and he occupied a rare middle ground - sympathetic to reason, allergic to credulity, yet open to philosophical theism or deism. This line reads like an antidote to both sides’ worst habits: the religious impulse to treat law as a threat, and the atheist impulse to treat law as a veto. It works because it reframes “law-governed” from cold and closed to generative and permissive, leaving you with a humbling thought: the more orderly the universe looks, the less confident you should be about what it can’t do.