“I’m not religious, however I think it’s a misunderstanding of both science and religion to say that they should be mutually exclusive. I don’t like that, I think it’s an unnecessary conflict.

“If I believed in God, I would say that the most spectacular demonstration of the ingenuity of the Creator is in setting up the laws of physics, and the laws of the universe, such that you could have such a wonderful thing as the biosphere – we find on earth that emerges. It’s such a tremendous property of the universe.

“And we don’t know where the laws of physics came from. It’s perfectly reasonable to say – I think someone set those up.”

Professor Brian Cox, February 2013

(Quotation transcribed from the interview on BBC Radio 2 Steve Wright in the Afternoon show: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p014k725 )