Quotes against Creation
This section is devoted to quotes from Evolutionists regarding Evolution, Creation and Intelligent Design theories. This section will list quotes from people who adhere to Darwinian Evolution and are stuanchly in opposition to Creationism and/or Intelligent Design. While it is well known that many Darwinists strongly disagree with and maybe even hate and despise any alternative theory such as Creationism or even Intelligent Design. Here we will see quotes from Darwinsits that show their firm support of Darwinian Evolution and their strong dissaproval of an interpretation of scientific data that suggests a higher intelligence or purpose.
"You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution."
-- Richard Dawkins, in Lanny Swerdlow, "My Sort Interview with Richard Dawkins" (Portland, Oregon, 1996)
"All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays." ~Cathy Ladman
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, but I'd rather not consider that).
-- Richard Dawkins, quoted from Josh Gilder, a creationist, in his critical review, "PBS's 'Evolution' series is propaganda, not science" (September, 2001)
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.
-- Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995), quoted from Victor J Stenger, Has Science Found God? (2001)
Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.
-- Richard Dawkins, on describing how one need only look upon nature where the wasp lays her eggs inside the body of a living caterpillar in order to dispense with the idea that the Universe is supervised by a benevolent deity, in The Devil's Chaplain (2004)
"Evolution is both fact and theory. Creationism is neither." [Anonymous]
"The fundamentalists deny that evolution has taken place; they deny that the earth and the universe as a whole are more than a few thousand years old, and so on. There is ample scientific evidence that the fundamentalists are wrong in these matters, and that their notions of cosmogony have about as much basis in fact as the Tooth Fairy has." [Isaac Asimov, quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt, by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996]
The proper place for the study of religious beliefs is in a church or temple, at home, or in a course on comparative religions, but not in a biology class. There is no place in our world for an ideology that seeks to close minds, force obedience, and return the world to a paradise that never was. Students should learn that the universe can be confronted and understood, that ideas and authority should be questioned, that an open mind is a good thing. Education does not exist to confirm people's superstitions, and children do not learn to think when they are fed only dogma." [Tim Berra, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism]
"Fundamentalists long for the return of a more moral America, an America that may never have been. All around them they see what they perceive as declining morality and spirituality. They reason that if humans share ancestry with the other animals, we have no reason to behave as anything other than animals. This view neglects the fact that humans are the only known animals with the ability to contemplate the consequences of their own actions. It also fails to recognize that there is a great deal of good in the world, the nightly news notwithstanding. Crime existed long before the theory of evolution, even before the writing of the Bible, and biologists do not like crime any more than the creationists do. Evolutionary theory is not a license to run amok, and neither is a belief in the literal interpretation of the Bible a guarantor of moral behavior." [Tim Berra, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism]
"No myth of miraculous creation is so marvelous as the face of man's evolution." [Robert Briffault (1876-1948) Rational Education,1930]
"Religious fundamentalists alone are a huge popular grouping in the United States, which resembles pre-industrial societies in that regard. This is a culture in which three-fourths of the population believe in religious miracles, half believe in the devil, 83 percent believe that the Bible is the 'actual' or the inspired word of God, 39 percent believe in the Biblical prediction of Armageddon and 'accept it with a certain fatalism,' a mere 9 percent accept Darwinian evolution while 44 percent believe that 'God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years,' and so on. The 'God and Country rally' that opened the national Republican convention is one remarkable illustration, which aroused no little amazement in conservative circles in Europe." [Noam Chomsky, "'Mandate for Change,' or Business as Usual," Z Magazine, February 1993, pp. 32-33]
"If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers... Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind." [Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925]
"Evolution should be one of the first things you learn at school... and what do they [children] get instead? Sacred hearts and incense. Shallow, empty religion". [Sunday Telegraph (UK) interview with Richard Dawkins, Sept. 26, 1999]
Let me try to make crystal clear what is established beyond reasonable doubt, and what needs further study, about evolution. Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can be doubted only by those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing to emotional blocks or to plain bigotry. By contrast, the mechanisms that bring evolution about certainly need study and clarification. There are no alternatives to evolution as history that can withstand critical examination. Yet we are constantly learning new and important facts about evolutionary mechanisms." [Theodosius Dobzhansky "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution", American Biology Teacher vol.35 (March 1973) reprinted in EVOLUTION VERSUS CREATIONISM, J. Peter Zetterberg ed., ORYX Press, Phoenix AZ 1983]
"Geology shows that fossils are of different ages. Paleontology shows a fossil sequence, the list of species represented changes through time. Taxonomy shows biological relationships among species. Evolution is the explanation that threads it all together. Creationism is the practice of squeeezing one's eyes shut and wailing "does not!." [Dr.Pepper@f241.n103.z1.fidonet.org]
"Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense." [Stephen Jay Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack]
"Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade-- a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense. We make and test risky predictions all the time; our success is not dogma, but a highly probable indication of evolution's basic truth." [Stephen Jay Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack]
"The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents." [Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism", The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 87/88, pg. 186]
"As in 1925, creationists are not battling for religion. They have been disowned by leading church men of all persuasions, for they debase religion even more than they misconstrue science. They are a motley collection to be sure, but their core of practical support lies with the evangelical right, and creationism is a mere stalking horse or subsidiary issue in a political program...The enemy is not fundamentalism; it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the 'liberal' rhetoric of 'equal time'." [Stephen J Gould]
"Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof." [Ashley Montagu]
"The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start (examining evolution), and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science---or of any honest intellectual inquiry." [Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus, 1990, quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt, by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996]
"If we are going to teach 'creation science' as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction." [Judith Hayes]
"It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a FACT, not theory, and that what is at issue within biology are questions of details of the process and the relative importance of different mechanisms of evolution." [R. C. Lewontin "Evolution/Creation Debate: A Time for Truth" Bioscience 31, 559 (1981) reprinted in EVOLUTION VERSUS CREATIONISM]
"We are convinced the masses of evidence render the application of the concept of evolution to man and the other primates beyond serious dispute." [Pontifical Academy of Sciences]
"I'm an evolutionist because I judge the evidence for the unity of life by common descent over billions of years to be overwhelming, not so that I can cheat on my wife or kick the cat with impunity. I live in no hope of heaven or fear of hell, but like most of my fellow Americans of all religious persuasions, I try to live a decent life. Folks like Tom DeLay just can't get it through their heads that a person can choose to live ethically because civilized life requires doing unto others as you would have them do unto you." [Chet Raymo, science columnist for The Boston Globe, Sept. 5 1999 article on the anti-evolution decision by Kansas School Board]
"They [the Creationists] have been getting away with this nonsense [Creation Science] for some time now, even to the extent of getting legislation passed to allow them to teach "creationism" side by side with evolution. The true scientific community has largely remained within its hallowed halls rather than storming out into the quadrangle to do battle with what it knows to be pure nonsense. Scientists, unlike religionists, are political neophytes and generally remain oblivious to the issue of religion. Average Americans are not willing, nor intellectually mature enough, to handle such heady stuff as questioning any religion except upon tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee issues. Undoubtedly, this results from living under a Constitution which, in its consummate fairness in not favoring one religion above another, has made attacks on religion nearly needless and obsolete. But in the First Amendment's success lies a great danger to our liberties. If we never question our religions or their motives, they will ultimately destroy our freedom to do so." [William H. Reynolds, Creationism: The Fossil Record and the Flood]
(When asked merely if they accept evolution, 45 percent of Americans say yes. The figure is 70 percent in China.) When the movie "Jurassic Park" was shown in Israel, it was condemned by some Orthodox rabbis because it accepted evolution and because it taught that dinosaurs lived a hundred million years ago--when, as is plainly stated at every Rosh Hashonhan and every Jewish wedding ceremony, the Universe is less than 6,000 years old." [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, p. 325]
"Louisiana's [1981] creationism law, which requires creationism to be taught wherever the theory of evolution is explained, is unconstitutional, a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled yesterday.... 'The act's intended effect is to discredit evolution by counterbalancing its teaching at every turn with the teaching of creationism, a religious belief,' the U.S. Court of Appeals said." [San Francisco Chronicle, 9 July 1985 (AP)]
"Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles." [Dr. James D. Watson, winner of the Nobel prize for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA]
"I would defend the liberty of concenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent." [Arthur C. Clarke]
"I have encountered a few "creationists" and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were _really_ mad, or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created that whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading mankind?" [Arthur C. Clarke, June 5, 1998, in the essay "Presidents, Experts, and Asteroids," pp 1532-3]
"Thus the creationist's favourite question "What is the use of half an eye?" Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye..." [Richard Dawkins]
"It is, therefore, our unequivocal conclusion that creationism, with its accounts of the origin of life by supernatural means, is not science." ["Science and Creationism", National Academy Press, 1984]