Geometry existed before the creation. It is co-eternal with the mind of God...Geometry provided God with a model for the Creation.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that geometry is a fundamental aspect of the universe, existing alongside divine thought and aiding in the act of creation.
Kepler emphasizes the idea that geometric principles predate creation itself, indicating that there is an intrinsic connection between mathematics, specifically geometry, and the divine mind of God. He posits that geometry serves as a foundational blueprint or model through which the universe was created, bridging science and spirituality by underscoring how logical structures govern the cosmos.
In practice
In a lecture on the intersection of science and spirituality, one might quote Kepler to illustrate the importance of mathematics in understanding our universe.
...Those laws are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts... and if piety allow us to say so, our understanding is in this respect of the same kind as the divine, at least as far as we are able to grasp something of it in our mortal life.
A most unfailing experience... of the excitement of sublunary (that is, human) natures by the conjunctions and aspects of the planets has instructed and compelled my unwilling belief.
We find, therefore, under this orderly arrangement, a wonderful symmetry in the universe, and a definite relation of harmony in the motion and magnitude of the orbs, of a kind that is not possible to obtain in any other way.
I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far far away from the boundaries of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you are enraged with me, I shall bear it. See, I cast the die, and I write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study him.
Eyesight should learn from reason.
I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure, Sky-bound was the mind, earth-bound the body rests. [Kepler's epitaph]
You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.
What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.
No doubt science cannot admit of compromises, and can only bring out the complete truth. Hence there must be controversy, and the strife may be, and sometimes must be, sharp. But must it even then be personal? Does it help science to attack the man as well as the statement? On the contrary, has not science the noble privilege of carrying on its controversies without personal quarrels?
I think that the discovery of antimatter was perhaps the biggest jump of all the big jumps in physics in our century.
Cancer is not one disease but many diseases.
We have this very clean picture of science, you know, these well-established rules with which we make predictions. But when you're really doing science, when you're doing research, you're at the edge of what we know.
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