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"The greatest mind in quantum electro-dynamics, Feynman, also believed God must be behind physics because he could not believe how certain universal constants came to exist without Him."

I'd like to see the source for this claim. I highly doubt he said such a thing. Everything I've read about Feynman indicates he was either an atheist or an agnostic; he was prickly when talking about science and God, and science and philosophy. If I remember right, he supposedly lost his temper at his father's funeral when he was asked to read something from the Torah.

(I really liked Gleick's biography of Feynman: Genius. Its also full of interesting side notes or diversions about other "geniuses.")

"I'd like to see the source for this claim. "

I'm sure it's an out-of-context quote from something Feynman wrote, as posted on one of the pro-creationist sites. I don't have time to run it down, but I've seen it posted before.

Feynman was not a man who put much credence in deities.

Well, here's something that Feynman did say, with a reference to its source. It seems to contradict the previous "quote."

God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out." (quoted in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything?, edited by P.C.W. Davies and J. Brown, 1988.)

What Feynman actually said was more like this:

"I'd like to see the source for this claim. I highly doubt he said such a thing. Everything I've read about Feynman indicates he was either an atheist or an agnostic;"

It's not your fault. Most academics today who write the textbooks, autobiographies etc actively and consciously avoid anything which might lead credence to Christianity and the belief in God. They've dramatically revised the textbooks from 40 years ago.

They'd have you believe Thomas Jefferson was an atheist (he was a Christian unitarian (not a trinitarian)), you've probably never heard of John Leland who used to be considered one of the 5 greatest founding fathers (with Madison, jefferson, etc etc). He was responsble for the Bill of Rights being included in the US Constitution (he forced Madison to adopt them). The problem is that he was a bible-thumping evangelical Baptist Preacher and his motivations for religious liberty could not be hidden behind some invented secular idealism.

“Immediately you would like to know where this number [ α (alpha)] for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi, or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It’s one of the greatest da-- mysteries in physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the “hand of God” wrote the number, and ‘we don’t know how He pushed His pencil’.”" -- Richard Feynman, Nobel Laurette Physics, QED The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Page 129., Princeton University Press, 1985.