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the only alternative [to evolution] is the doctrine of special creation, which may be true, but is irrational.
(LT More)
We find that while ID arguments may be true, ... ID is not science.
(US Dist Judge, John Jones)
[this quote is a little ambiguous, but the point is that he wouldn't say the same for a naturalistic assessment of our origins, while both are (or should be) based on the same body of evidence]
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between [naturalistic] science and the supernatural.
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs ... because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we can not allow a Divine Foot in the door.
(Richard Lewontin, "Billions and billions of Demons," the New York Review, Januari 9, 1997,p. 31)
Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded form science because it is not naturalistic.
(SD Todd, Nature 410(67520):423, September 30,1999)
[Evolution is] a theory universally accepted not because it can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible
(DMS Watson)
It is tempting to go one step further and speculate that the entire universe evolved from literally nothing.
(AH Gith & PJ Steinhardt)
...that our Universe had its physical origin as a quantum fluctuation of some pre-existing true vacuum or state of nothingness.
(Edward Tryon)
This "quantum cosmology" provides a loophole for the universe to, so to speak, spring into existence from nothing, without violating any laws of physics.
(Paul Davies)
The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing some ten billion years after the universe evolved literally out of nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.
(R Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale)
The universe can spontaneously create itself out of nothing.
(Steven Hawking)
Because there's a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.
(S Hawking & L Mlodinow)
Perhaps the big bang was just nothingness doing what comes naturally.
(A Gefter, "Existence: Why is there a universe?", New Scientist, 2822 p. 27-28 (2011))
[The big bang] represents the instantaneous suspension of physical laws, the sudden abrupt flash of lawlessness that allowed something to come out of nothing.
It represents a true miracle..."
(Paul Davies "The Edge of Infinity)
But there are plenty of mysteries left, many of them discussed by other authors in this issue.
Of what kind of matter are galaxies and galactic clusters made?
How did the stars,planets and galaxies form?
(Steven Weinberg, "Life in the Universe" p.35)
This [big bang] picture of the universe ... is in agreement with all the observable evidence that we have today...
Nevertheless, it leaves a number of important questions unanswered ... [including](the origins of stars and galaxies)
(S Hawking, "A Brief History of Time")
Galaxies are complicated and we don't really understand how they form.
It's really an embarrassment.
(V Thoman & R Webb Nature, 469(7330): p. 305-306, 2011)
Thus, the existence of life of any kind seems to require a cancellation between different contributions to the vacuum energy, accurate to about 120 decimal places.
It is possible that this cancellation will be explained in terms of some future theory, the vacuum energy involves arbitrary constants, which must be carefully adjusted to make the total vacuum energy small enough for life to be possible
(Steven Weinberg "Life in the Universe")
[The extreme fine tuning of the Universe represents] a cataclysm for physicists, and the only way that we know how to make sense of it is through the reviled and despised Anthropic Principle.
(Leonard Susskind, "the Cosmis Landscape")
Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.
(R Dawkins, "the Blind Watchmaker")
Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved.
(Francis Crick "what mad pursuit")
The core of the humanistic philosophy is naturalism: the proposition that the natural world proceeds according to its own internal dynamics, without divine or supernatural control or guidance, and that we human beings are creations of that process.
(EL Erickson)
No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism.
Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life in this planet even if there were no evidence for it.
(Steven Pinker "How the mind works" p.162)
I have faith and belief myself.
I believe that nothing beyond those natural laws is needed.
I have no evidence for this.
It is simply what i have faith in and what i believe.
(Isaac Asimov, "Counting the Eons" p.10)
There is no doubt that if you jump into the air, you will and up on the ground. It makes no difference whether you understand or even believe in gravity. What goes up, must come down.
Just as definitely, life on Earth has evolved and is continuing to evolve all around us all the time.
(Prentice Hall 1998, p.233)
...no educated person any longer questions the validity of the so-called theory of evolution, which we know to be a simple fact.
(Ernst Mayr, Harvard)
Scientists should refuse formal debates because they do more harm than good, but scientists still need to counter the creationist message.
(EC Scott, New Scientist, April 22 2000, p.46)
It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked).
(R Dawkins, "the Blind Watchmaker")
No myth deserves a more empathic death than the idea that science is an inherently impartial and objective enterprise...
Yet it continues to thrive among working scientists because it serves us so well..."
(SJ Gould, Harvard "Science in the Twentieth Century" 1978 p.344)
A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
(M Planck)
The extreme rarity [i.e. absence] of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontologists ... we view our data as so bad that we never see the process we profess to study
(SJ Gould, Harvard "Natural History" vol. 86)
Despite the promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing' evolution it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists...
(DB Kitts "Evolution" vol. 28 p.467)
These evolutionary happenings are unique, unrepeatable and irreversible.
...the applicability of the experimental method to the study of such unique historical processes is severely restricted before all else by the time intervals involved, which far exceed the lifetime of any human experimenter.
(T Dobzhansky "American Scientist" vol. 45 p. 388)
...unique and unrepeatable, like the history of England.
This part of the theory [evolution has occurred] is therefore a historical theory, about unique events, and unique events are, by definition, not part of science, for they are unrepeatable and not subject to test.
(C Patterson "Evolution" p.15)
i could have added more, maybe i will later.
But i think you get the idea.
the only alternative [to evolution] is the doctrine of special creation, which may be true, but is irrational.
(LT More)
We find that while ID arguments may be true, ... ID is not science.
(US Dist Judge, John Jones)
[this quote is a little ambiguous, but the point is that he wouldn't say the same for a naturalistic assessment of our origins, while both are (or should be) based on the same body of evidence]
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between [naturalistic] science and the supernatural.
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs ... because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we can not allow a Divine Foot in the door.
(Richard Lewontin, "Billions and billions of Demons," the New York Review, Januari 9, 1997,p. 31)
Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded form science because it is not naturalistic.
(SD Todd, Nature 410(67520):423, September 30,1999)
[Evolution is] a theory universally accepted not because it can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible
(DMS Watson)
It is tempting to go one step further and speculate that the entire universe evolved from literally nothing.
(AH Gith & PJ Steinhardt)
...that our Universe had its physical origin as a quantum fluctuation of some pre-existing true vacuum or state of nothingness.
(Edward Tryon)
This "quantum cosmology" provides a loophole for the universe to, so to speak, spring into existence from nothing, without violating any laws of physics.
(Paul Davies)
The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing some ten billion years after the universe evolved literally out of nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.
(R Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale)
The universe can spontaneously create itself out of nothing.
(Steven Hawking)
Because there's a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.
(S Hawking & L Mlodinow)
Perhaps the big bang was just nothingness doing what comes naturally.
(A Gefter, "Existence: Why is there a universe?", New Scientist, 2822 p. 27-28 (2011))
[The big bang] represents the instantaneous suspension of physical laws, the sudden abrupt flash of lawlessness that allowed something to come out of nothing.
It represents a true miracle..."
(Paul Davies "The Edge of Infinity)
But there are plenty of mysteries left, many of them discussed by other authors in this issue.
Of what kind of matter are galaxies and galactic clusters made?
How did the stars,planets and galaxies form?
(Steven Weinberg, "Life in the Universe" p.35)
This [big bang] picture of the universe ... is in agreement with all the observable evidence that we have today...
Nevertheless, it leaves a number of important questions unanswered ... [including](the origins of stars and galaxies)
(S Hawking, "A Brief History of Time")
Galaxies are complicated and we don't really understand how they form.
It's really an embarrassment.
(V Thoman & R Webb Nature, 469(7330): p. 305-306, 2011)
Thus, the existence of life of any kind seems to require a cancellation between different contributions to the vacuum energy, accurate to about 120 decimal places.
It is possible that this cancellation will be explained in terms of some future theory, the vacuum energy involves arbitrary constants, which must be carefully adjusted to make the total vacuum energy small enough for life to be possible
(Steven Weinberg "Life in the Universe")
[The extreme fine tuning of the Universe represents] a cataclysm for physicists, and the only way that we know how to make sense of it is through the reviled and despised Anthropic Principle.
(Leonard Susskind, "the Cosmis Landscape")
Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.
(R Dawkins, "the Blind Watchmaker")
Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved.
(Francis Crick "what mad pursuit")
The core of the humanistic philosophy is naturalism: the proposition that the natural world proceeds according to its own internal dynamics, without divine or supernatural control or guidance, and that we human beings are creations of that process.
(EL Erickson)
No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism.
Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life in this planet even if there were no evidence for it.
(Steven Pinker "How the mind works" p.162)
I have faith and belief myself.
I believe that nothing beyond those natural laws is needed.
I have no evidence for this.
It is simply what i have faith in and what i believe.
(Isaac Asimov, "Counting the Eons" p.10)
There is no doubt that if you jump into the air, you will and up on the ground. It makes no difference whether you understand or even believe in gravity. What goes up, must come down.
Just as definitely, life on Earth has evolved and is continuing to evolve all around us all the time.
(Prentice Hall 1998, p.233)
...no educated person any longer questions the validity of the so-called theory of evolution, which we know to be a simple fact.
(Ernst Mayr, Harvard)
Scientists should refuse formal debates because they do more harm than good, but scientists still need to counter the creationist message.
(EC Scott, New Scientist, April 22 2000, p.46)
It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked).
(R Dawkins, "the Blind Watchmaker")
No myth deserves a more empathic death than the idea that science is an inherently impartial and objective enterprise...
Yet it continues to thrive among working scientists because it serves us so well..."
(SJ Gould, Harvard "Science in the Twentieth Century" 1978 p.344)
A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
(M Planck)
The extreme rarity [i.e. absence] of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontologists ... we view our data as so bad that we never see the process we profess to study
(SJ Gould, Harvard "Natural History" vol. 86)
Despite the promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing' evolution it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists...
(DB Kitts "Evolution" vol. 28 p.467)
These evolutionary happenings are unique, unrepeatable and irreversible.
...the applicability of the experimental method to the study of such unique historical processes is severely restricted before all else by the time intervals involved, which far exceed the lifetime of any human experimenter.
(T Dobzhansky "American Scientist" vol. 45 p. 388)
...unique and unrepeatable, like the history of England.
This part of the theory [evolution has occurred] is therefore a historical theory, about unique events, and unique events are, by definition, not part of science, for they are unrepeatable and not subject to test.
(C Patterson "Evolution" p.15)
i could have added more, maybe i will later.
But i think you get the idea.
Last edited:
