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Quotations about Creationism and Intelligent Design.

Creationism is the position that the Universe, Earth, and life of Earth were created by one or more intelligent agents, usually the God of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism as recorded in Genesis and the Quran.

Intelligent Design (ID) the position that there is positive evidence that life on Earth was created by one or more intelligent agents, but without making any explicit claim as to the identity or divinity of the agent or agents.

Western thought

Hebrew scriptures

• "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." -Psalms 19:1.

• "Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind: 'Who is this that speaks so ignorantly? Stand up like a man: I will question you, and you will answer me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you are so smart. Who determined its measurements--surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" -Job 38:1-7.

Greek and Roman quotes

• In the Timaeus, Plato wrote the following question and answer sometime around 350 BC:

"Is the world created or uncreated? -- that is the first question.

Created, I reply, being visible and tangible and having a body, and therefore sensible; and if sensible, then created; and if created, made by a cause, and the cause is the ineffable father of all things, who had before him an eternal archetype."[1]

• "Only because the people see
  

So much in land and sky

For which they do not know the cause,

They think Divinities are working there.

If they could but see that

Nothing can be created from nothing,

Then they would advance one more step

Toward the answer that they seek:

Those eternal elements became

Everything that is,

Without interference from Gods."

--Lucretius, "[[w:On the nature of things | De rerum natura]]," written about 60 BC

• "Gutta cavat lapidem, non vi sed saepe cadendo." (The drop excavates the stone, not with force but by falling often.)

--Publius Ovidius Naso, Epistulae Ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea)

Christian New Testament

• "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse; for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools." -Romans 1:18-22.

• "First of all you must understand this, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own passions and saying:

'Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation.'

They deliberately ignore this fact: that by the word of God the heavens were created long ago, and an earth formed out of water and by means of water, through which the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished." 2 Peter 3:3-6.

19th century and earlier

• "The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious–fabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance." -Thomas Huxley, The interpreters of Genesis and the interpreters of Nature (1885)

• "Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled." -Charles Darwin [2]

• "Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books." -Francis Bacon

• "The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless." -Robert Ingersoll

• "The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence." -Thomas H. Huxley

• "History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions; and, as matters now stand, it is hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the new generation, educated under the influences of the present day, will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the 'Origin of Species' with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them. Against any such a consummation let us all devoutly pray; for the scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors." -Thomas Huxley, The Coming of Age of "The Origin of Species (1880); Collected Essays, vol. 2

• "I attacked the foundations of morality in Erewhon, and nobody cared two straws, I tore open the wounds of my Redeemer as he hung upon the Cross in The Fair Haven, and people rather liked it. But when I attacked Mr. Darwin they were up in arms in a moment." -Samuel Butler, Evolution Old and New, 1879, p. 54.

• "I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use." -Galileo Galilei

• "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." -Charles Darwin

• "It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma, or want of dogma, that the danger lies." -Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh

• "Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; & anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would. I dunno." -Mark Twain, "Was the World Made for Man?"

• "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night. God said 'Let Newton be!' and all was light." -Alexander Pope

• "The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.... Every influx of atheism, of skepticism, is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion, and making way for truth." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "Religions die when they are proven to be true. Science is the record of dead religions." -Oscar Wilde

• "There is more religion in men's science, than there is science in their religion." -Henry David Thoreau

• "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." -Isaac Newton ("General Scholium," in Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton. 1687)

• "When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled." -Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

20th century

Sourced

• ¹⁶O has exactly the right nuclear energy level either to prevent all the carbon from turning into oxygen or to facilitate sufficient production of ¹⁶O for life. Fred Hoyle, who discovered these coincidences in 1953, concluded that "a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology. ~ Ross, Hugh; President, Reasons to Believe. " Design and the Anthropic Principle". Reasons.org. Retrieved on 2006-09-13.

• "Amazing fine tuning occurs in the laws that make this [complexity] possible. Realization of the complexity of what is accomplished makes it very difficult not to use the word 'miraculous' without taking a stand as to the ontological status of the word." ~ George Ellis (British astrophysicist) Ellis, G.F.R. 1993. The Anthropic Principle: Laws and Environments. The Anthropic Principle, F. Bertola and U.Curi, ed. New York, Cambridge University Press, p. 30

• "Another philosophical question regards the very definition of the word 'selection'. One of the original formulations of selection was 'the survival of the fittest'. If you open a standard textbook of genetics 'fitness' will probably be defined as 'the ability to survive' or something similar. But if the 'fittest' are defined as 'the best survivors' then the idea of natural selection becomes 'the survival of those best at surviving'. So what else is new? If there is no more to Darwinism than a truism then the whole theory rests on very shaky ground." ~ B. Leith, The Descent of Darwin: A Handbook of Doubts about Darwinism (Collins, 1982), p. 21

• "Anthropological, biological, and genetic evidence all put the origin of modern humans at between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, probably in Africa. There is also much data that show an outburst of cultural behavior occurring around 50,000-40,000 years ago in Europe. That's when archaeologists date the oldest evidence of burial ceremonies, body ornaments, and cave paintings." ~ William J. Cromie, Harvard Gazette article, 'Facing up to modern man - Evidence shows our brains and faces have gotten smaller', which discusses the work of Harvard professor of biological anthropology Daniel Lieberman

• "Any competent biologist is aware of a multitude of problems yet unresolved and of questions yet unanswered. After all, biologic research shows no sign of approaching completion; quite the opposite is true. Disagreements and clashes of opinion are rife among biologists, as they should be in a living and growing science. Antievolutionists mistake, or pretend to mistake, these disagreements as indications of dubiousness of the entire doctrine of evolution. Their favorite sport is stringing together quotations, carefully and sometimes expertly taken out of context, to show that nothing is really established or agreed upon among evolutionists. Some of my colleagues and myself have been amused and amazed to read ourselves quoted in a way showing that we are really antievolutionists under the skin." ~ Theodosius Dobzhansky, Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution, 1973 [3]

• "As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency—or, rather, Agency—must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?" ~ George Greenstein (American astronomer) Greenstein, George. The Symbiotic, Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos. (New York: William Morrow, (1988), pp. 26-27

• "Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say 'supernatural') plan." ~ Arno Penzias (Nobel laureate in physics and co-discoverer of the radiation afterglow), quoted in Margenau, H and R.A. Varghese, ed. 1992. Cosmos, Bios, and Theos. La Salle, IL, Open Court, p. 83.
  • Alternative version: "Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly-improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan." ~ Arno Penzias, quoted in Walter Bradley, "The 'Just-so' Universe: The Fine-Tuning of Constants and Conditions in the Cosmos", in William Dembski and James Kushiner, eds., Signs of Intelligence. 168)

• "Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled." ~ Charles Darwin [1]

• "Biochemists and biologists who adhere blindly to the Darwinism theory search for results that will be in agreement with their theories and consequently orient their research in a given direction, whether it be in the field of ecology, ethology, sociology, demography (dynamics of populations), genetics (so-called evolutionary genetics), or paleontology. This intrusion of theories has unfortunate results: it deprives observations and experiments of their objectivity, makes them biased, and, moreover, creates false problems." ~ P. P. Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation (Academic Press, 1977), p. 7

• "Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books." ~ Francis Bacon

• "Churches are block-booking seats for March of the Penguins, which is apparently a "condemnation of gay marriage" and puts forward the case for "intelligent design", ie, Creationism. To be honest, this is good news. If American Christians want to go public on the fact that they're now morally guided by penguins, at least we know where we all stand." ~ Caitlin Moran, London Times Online, "Penguins lead way" section of 20 September 2005 column [4]

• "The concept of relative adaptation removes the apparent tautology in the theory of natural selection. Without it the theory of natural selection states that fitter individuals have more offspring and then defines the fitter as being those that leave more offspring; since some individuals will always have more offspring than others by sheer chance, nothing is explained.… Unfortunately the concept of relative adaptation also requires the ceteris paribus assumption, so that in practice it is not easy to predict which of two forms will leave more offspring." ~ Richard Lewontin, "Adaptation", Scientific American 239(3), September 1978, pp. 166–167

• "[Darwin's] triumph has won for us a common height from which we see the whole world of living beings as well as all inorganic nature; phenomena of every order we now regard as expressions of natural causes. The supernatural has no longer a standing is science; it has vanished like a dream, and the halls consecrated to its thraldom of the intellect are becoming radiant with a more cheerful faith." ~ Charles Otis Whitman, 1919 (posth.)

• "The discipline of biology will not only survive but prosper if it turns out that genetic information really is the product of preexisting intelligence. Biologists will have to give up their dogmatic materialism and discard unproductive hypotheses like the prebiotic soup, but to abandon bad ideas is a gain, not a loss. Freed of the metaphysical chains that tie it to nineteenth-century materialism, biology can turn to the fascinating task of discovering how the intelligence embodied in the genetic information works through matter to make the organism function. In that case chemical evolution will go the way of alchemy—abandoned because a better understanding of the problem revealed its futility—and science will have reached a new plateau." ~ Phillip E. Johnson, Reason in the Balance, p. 92

• "The fact that the theory of natural selection is difficult to test has led some people, anti-Darwinists and even some great Darwinists, to claim that is a tautology. A tautology like 'All tables are tables' is not, of course, testable; nor has it any explanatory power. It is therefore most surprising to hear that some of the greatest contemporary Darwinists themselves formulate the theory in such a way that it amounts to the tautology that those organisms that leave most offspring leave most offspring. And C. H. Waddington even says somewhere (and he defends this view in other places) that 'Natural selection … turns out … to be a tautology.' However, he attributes at the same place to the theory an 'enormous power … of explanation.' Since the explanatory power of a tautology is obviously zero, something must be wrong here." ~ Karl Popper, "Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind", Dialectica 32(3-4), 1978, p. 344 (ellipses in original)

• "I am not arguing with the scientist who explains the elephant, but only with the sophist who explains it away." ~ G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man.

• "I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing." ~ Alan Sandage (winner of the Crawford prize in astronomy) Willford, J.N. March 12, 1991. Sizing up the Cosmos: An Astronomers Quest. New York Times, p. B9.

• "I have quoted some voices of dissent coming from biologists in eminent academic positions. There have been many others, just as critical of the orthodox doctrine, though not always as outspoken —and their number is steadily growing. Although these criticisms have made numerous breaches in the walls, the citadel still stands—mainly, as said before, because nobody has a atisfactory alternative to offer. The history of science shows that a well-established theory can take a lot of battering and get itself into a tangle of contradictions—the fourth phase of 'Crisis and Doubt' in the historic cycle and yet still be upheld by the establishment until a breakthrough occurs, initiating a new departure, and the start of a new cycle. But that event is not yet in sight. In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutation plus natural selection—quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection a tautology." ~ Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up (Picador, 1983), pp. 184–185

• "I meet many people offended by evolution, who passionately prefer to be the personal handicraft of God than to arise by blind physical and chemical forces over aeons from slime. They also tend to be less than assiduous in exposing themselves to the evidence. Evidence has little to do with it: what they wish to be true, they believe is true.… The clearest evidence of our evolution can be found in our genes. But evolution is still being fought, ironically by those whose own DNA proclaims it—in the schools, in the courts, in textbook publishing houses, and on the question of just how much pain we can inflict on other animals without crossing some ethical threshold." ~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, p. 325.

• "If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs." ~ The Guardian, "One side can be wrong", 1 September 2005

• "In all their polemics, the anti-creationists invariably avoid discussing the actual scientific evidence for macro-evolution. If there were any such evidence, they could easily settle the whole conflict, merely by presenting the evidence! Instead they seem compelled to resort to bombast ridicule, defamation, intimidation, and distortion. Surely that great body of working scientists, largely uninvolved so far in the creation/evolution conflict will soon begin to see that a two-model approach to all scientific study is salutary and will persuade their more emotional brethren to open their minds to potential truth wherever it might be found." ~ Henry Morris, founder of the Institute for Creation Research

• "IN SHORT, three concepts, evolution, in the minimal sense of "descent with modification" (no "emergence", no "higher and lower" allowed), variation, in the sense of Mendelian micromutation, tiny changes in the structure or arrangement of the genes, the ultimate material of heredity (no sweeping or sudden alterations allowed), and natural selection, the decrease in frequency of those variants that happen in each successive generation to be less well adapted than others to their particular environment: these three form a tight circle within which, in happy self-confirmation, neo-Darwinian thinking moves. To those who believe in it, this circle is an ample intellectual dwelling place, roomy enough in fact to house all the immense achievements of modern biological research. To those not so convinced, however, the circle seems a strangely constricted one. They may even agree with the Professor Emeritus of Zoology at Cambridge that 'no amount of argument, or clever epigram, can disguise the inherent improbability of orthodox (Darwinian) theory.'" ~ M. Grene, "The Faith of Darwinism", Encounter, November 1959, p. 50 (emphasis in original)

• "In the American vernacular, 'theory' often means "imperfect fact"--part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is 'only a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): 'Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science--that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was.'
  Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
  Moreover, 'fact' doesn't mean 'absolute certainty'; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
  Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory--natural selection--to explain the mechanism of evolution." ~ Stephen J. Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory"; Discover, May 1981

• "Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these [evolutionary science] controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for 'both theories' would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?" ~ The Guardian, "One side can be wrong", 1 September 2005 [5]

• "It is absurd for the evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything." ~ G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas.

• "It may be true that scientism and evolutionism (not science and evolution) are among the causes of atheism and materialism. It is at least equally true that biblical literalism, from its earlier flat-earth and geocentric forms to its recent young-earth and flood-geology forms, is one of the major causes of atheism and materialism. Many scientists and intellectuals have simply taken the literalists at their word and rejected biblical materials as being superseded or contradicted by modern science. Without having in hand a clear and persuasive alternative, they have concluded that it is nobler to be damned by the literalists than to dismiss the best testimony of research and reason. Intellectual honesty and integrity demand it." ~ Conrad Hyers, The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science

• "A life-giving factor lies at the centre of the whole machinery and design of the world." ~ John Wheeler (American physicist) Wheeler, John A. "Foreword", in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler. (Oxford, U. K.: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. vii.

• "The main task of any theory of evolution is to explain adaptive complexity, that is, to explain the same set of facts that Paley used as evidence of a creator." ~ John Maynard Smith, "The status of neo-darwinism", in C.H. Waddington, ed., Towards a Theoretical Biology (University Press, Edinburgh, 1969)

• "The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history." ~ Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973)

• "No geological difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements and necessary inferences of Scripture." ~ Henry Morris [6]

• "One way or another, Darwinists meet the question 'Is Darwinism true?' with an answer that amounts to an assertion of power: 'Well, it is science, as we define science, and you will have to be content with that.' Some of us are not content with that, because we know that the empirical evidence for the creative power of natural selection is somewhere between weak and non-existent. Artificial selection of fruit flies or domestic animals produces limited change within the species, but tells us nothing about how insects and mammals came into existence in the first place. In any case, whatever artificial selection achieves is due to the employment of human intelligence consciously pursuing a goal. The whole point of the blind watchmaker thesis, however, is to establish what material processes can do in the absence of purpose and intelligence. That Darwinist authorities continually overlook this crucial distinction gives us little confidence in their objectivity." ~ Phillip E. Johnson [7].

• "Poll: Majority of Americans Reject Evolution. Accept 'The Flintstones'." ~ Ironictimes.com[2]

• "Religious opposition to evolution propels antievolutionism. Although antievolutionists pay lip service to supposed scientific problems with evolution, what motivates them to battle its teaching is apprehension over the implications of evolution for religion." ~ National Academy of Sciences http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/4550_antievolutionism_and_creationi_2_13_2001.asp]

• "Science is fundamentally a game. It is a game with one overriding and defining rule:

1. Let us see how far and to what extent we can explain the behavior of the physical and material universe in terms of purely physical and material causes, without invoking the supernatural." ~ Richard Dickerson, Journal of Molecular Evolution 34:277, 1992

• "The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero." ~ Ilya Prigogine (Chemist-Physicist) Recipient of 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry I. Prigogine, N. Gregair, A. Babbyabtz, Physics Today 25, pp. 23-28

• "Students are ill served by any effort in science classrooms to blur the distinction between science and other ways of knowing, including those concerned with the supernatural." ~ Association for the Advancement of Science, in a news release supporting the rejection by the National Academy of Science of the Kansas Board of Education's decision to a) rewrite the definition of science so that it is no longer limited to a search for natural explanations of phenomena and 2) teach Intelligent Design as a science in competition with evolution, which is presented as greatly more controversial in the scientific community than scientists themselves concede.

• "The theory of natural selection may be so formulated that it is far from tautological. In this case it is not only testable, but it turns out to be not strictly universally true." ~ Karl Popper, "Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind", Dialectica 32(3-4), 1978, p. 346 (ellipses in original)

• "The trouble was that in reading widely during my early teens I ran into the Darwinian theory, for a little while with illusions and then with less respect than adults with bated breath were wont to show. The theory seemed to me to run like this: 'If among the varieties of a species there is one that survives better in the environment than the others, then the variety that survives best is the one that best survives.' If I had known the word tautology I would have called this a tautology. People with still more bated breath, called it natural selection. I made them angry, just as I do today, by saying that it did nothing at all. You could select potatoes as much as you pleased but you would never make them into a rabbit. Nor by selecting oak trees could you make them into colonies of bats, and those who thought they could in my opinion were bats in the belfry." ~ Fred Hoyle, Mathematics of Evolution (Memphis, Tenn.: Acorn Enterprises, 1999), p. 2

• "This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always accepted the word of the Bible: In the beginning God created heaven and earth... [But] for the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; [and] as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries." ~ Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers [New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978], 116. Professor Jastrow was the founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute, now director of the Mount Wilson Institute and its observatory.)

• "Today, almost half a century after the publication of the Encyclical, fresh knowledge has led to the recognition that evolution is more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge … [however,] theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person." ~ Pope John Paul II [8]

• "U.S. Falling Behind in Science, Engineering; Surging ahead in superstition, mumbo-jumbo." ~ Ironictimes.com [3]

• "We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures ... If the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in." ~ John O'Keefe (astronomer at NASA) Heeren, F. 1995. Show Me God. Wheeling, IL, Searchlight Publications, p. 200.

• "We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend. Except for children (who don't know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is; where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here; if time will one day flow backward and effects precede causes; or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know." ~ Carl Sagan (From an introduction to "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking)

• "We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it, and that is all." ~ Clarence Darrow, in response to William Jennings Bryant in the opening remarks of the Scopes Monkey Trial.

• "What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by the species on Darwin's Galapagos Islands? The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror.… The God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray." ~ David Hull, reviewing Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial for Nature

• "When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics." ~ Frank Tipler (Professor of Mathematical Physics) Tipler, F.J. 1994. The Physics Of Immortality. New York, Doubleday, Preface.

• "When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled." ~ Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

• "Several thousand years ago, a small tribe of ignorant near-savages wrote various collections of myths, wild tales, lies, and gibberish. Over the centuries, these stories were embroidered, garbled, mutilated, and torn into small pieces that were then repeatedly shuffled. Finally, this material was badly translated into several languages successively. The resultant text, creationists feel, is the best guide to this complex and technical subject." ~ Tom Weller, 1990, Science Made Stupid. Houghton Mifflin Company (ISBN 0395366461).

• "Creationism is wrong; totally, utterly, and absolutely wrong. I would go further. There are degrees of being wrong. The creationists are at the bottom of the scale. They pull every trick in the book to justify their position. Indeed, at times they verge right over into the downright dishonest. Scientific Creationism is not just wrong, it is ludicrously implausible. It is a grotesque parody of human thought, and a downright misuse of human intelligence. In short, to the believer, it is an insult to God." ~ Michael Ruse, 1982, Darwinism Defended. Addison-Wesley (ISBN 0201062739).

• All the actions of created intelligences are not merely the actions of God. He has created a universe of beings which are said to act freely and responsibly as the proximate causes of their own moral actions. When individuals do evil things it is not God the Creator and Preserver acting. If God was the proximate cause of every act it would make all events to be "God in motion". That is nothing less than pantheism, or more exactly, pandeism. [However, t]he Creator is distinct from his creation. The reality of secondary causes is what separates Christian theism from pandeism. ~ Bob Burridge, Theology Proper - Lesson 4: The Decrees of God (1997)[9]

• I cringe at the thought that Raymond Damadian was refused his just honor because of his religious beliefs. Having silly ideas in one field is no good reason to deny merit for great ideas in another field. Apart from the fact that this time the Creation Scientists will think that there is good reason to think that they are the objects of unfair treatment at the hands of the scientific community. ~ Michael Ruse, at Talk Origins

• "Intelligent Design" is a sham. Promote Darwin's Evolution, the REAL thing! ~ Manfred F. Schieder (1937 - ) From http://rebirthofreason.com/Spirit/Quotes/Author_537.shtml

• "We share most of our DNA with chimpanzees, but nowhere in the genome have we found what it is that makes us so different from chimps,"

- James Le Fanu, medical doctor and journalist, author of "Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves" Timesonline.co.uk

Attributed

• "To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today." -Isaac Asimov

• "We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for awhile, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces." -Carl Sagan

• "It is, for example, impossible for evolution to account for the fact than one single cell can carry more data than all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together."-Anthony Flew, Professor of Philosophy, former atheist, author, and debater

• "Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it.… Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory." -Jimmy Swaggart

• "We are convinced that masses of evidence render the application of the concept of evolution to man and other primates beyond serious dispute." -The Pontifical Academy of Sciences

• "We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture." -Pastor Ray Mummert, creationist/intelligent design proponent, March 2005

• The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural 'constants' were off even slightly. You see, even if you dismiss man as a chance happening, the fact remains that the universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life -- almost contrived -- you might say a 'put-up job'. -Dr. Paul Davies (noted author and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Adelaide University)

• "...how surprising it is that the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe should allow for the existence of beings who could observe it. Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values." -Professor Steven Weinberg (Nobel Laureate in High Energy Physics [a field of science that deals with the very early universe], writing in the journal "Scientific American".)

• "It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design." -Anthony Flew Professor of Philosophy, former atheist, author, and debater

• "What turns a mere piece of matter from being mere matter into an animated being? What gives certain special physical patterns in the universe the mysterious privilege of feeling sensations and having experiences?" -D.R. Hofstadter

• "The sacred myth of 'Creationism' and its ineffectually disguised equivalent 'Intelligent Design', are basically the pre-scientific modes of thinking of the limited and incurious who disdain the ability for critical inquiry and the life of the mind: it's integral to a culture that values superstition and dogmatism over learning." -The Times, Dec. 26, 2008 and Paul L. Buysrogge

Eastern thought

Hindu scriptures

Passage from the Creation Hymn in the Rig Veda (exact date of writing debated; around 3100-1500 BC).

• "The non-existent was not; the existent was not at that time. The atmosphere was not nor the heavens which are beyond. What was concealed? Where? In whose protection? Was it water? An unfathomable abyss?

There was neither death nor immortality then. There was not distinction of day or night. That alone breathed windless by its own power. Other than that there was not anything else.

Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning. All this was an indistinguishable sea. That which becomes, that which was enveloped by the void, that alone was born through the power of heat.

Upon that desire arose in the beginning. This was the first discharge of thought. Sages discovered this link of the existent to the nonexistent, having searched in the heart with wisdom.

Their line [of vision] was extended across; what was below, what was above? There were impregnators, there were powers: inherent power below, impulses above.

Who knows truly? Who here will declare whence it arose, whence this creation? The gods are subsequent to the creation of this. Who, then, knows whence it has come into being?

Whence this creation has come into being; whether it was made or not; he in the highest heaven is its surveyor. Surely he knows, or perhaps he knows not."

See also

The following pages include extensive additional material on this subject:

• Charles Darwin
• Richard Dawkins
• Thomas Henry Huxley
• Stephen Jay Gould
• Evolution
• Creationism and evolution