Quote Forum: Creation or Evolution

This month we present the first of a two-part series on the subject of origins-in this issue dealing primarily with the question of how, and next month with when. The following rather notable quotations have been accumulated over a period of many years. While making a sincere effort to preserve the integrity and intent of all sources (especially in terms of the context), we have admittedly arranged the quotations with editorial bias. "If you threw a bomb into your room, would you open the door to find it all straightened up and in order, or would you find junk scattered everywhere?" -Lanny & Marilyn Johnson, referring to the likelihood of a 'Big Bang' event ever resulting in the sort of orderly Universe in which we live, in Kids Think & Believe, May/June 1995, Alpha Omega Institute. "(Perhaps they're just) weeping seams of moisture which, over time, have caused mineralized molecules of water to mix and stain into a beautiful collage of color and design...spectacular images that depict historical events. No one alive today observed its creation. On the empirically scientific face of things what else can be said about this oddity of nature?" -T.A. Green, referring to what most people recognize as the works of Michelangelo (Sistine Chapel, Rome), illustrating just how ludicrous the evolutionary worldview of design without a Designer really is, in Faith in Science, Associates for Biblical Research 8/10/93. ________________________________________________ "...this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory." -Charles Darwin, in Origin of Species, referring to the conspicuous lack of intermediate varieties and fossil links in the geological strata. ________________________________________________ "The whole point of Darwinism is to explain the world in a way that excludes any role for a Creator." "Creationist-bashing as a substitute for evidence is common in Darwinian polemics." -Phillip Johnson, professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, author of Darwin on Trial, ©1991 InterVarsity Press. Only 9% of all Americans believe in natural evolution. 53% of all women and 39% of all men believe that God created man within the last 10,000 years. -U.S. News & World Report, December 1991. "I find it a lot easier to hate them in print than I do in person." -evolutionist Dr. Michael Ruse, professor of zoology and philosophy of science at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, referring to intelligent de-sign advocates, in the November/December '94 issue of The Real Issue, Christian Leadership Ministries. "Rule #1. Science holds the answers to all the quest-ions of life; Rule #2. Anyone who does not believe Rule #1 is not scientific." -the first two rules of The Ten Rules of Scientific Fundamentalism, excerpted from a tongue-in-cheek Letter to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal by Christopher Iliff, December 6, 1993. ________________________________________________ "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." -Genesis 1:1, New American Standard Bible ________________________________________________ "The Ninth (Insight) reveals our ultimate destiny. It makes it all crystal clear. It reiterates that as humans, we are the culmination of the whole of evolution. It talks about matter beginning in a weak form and increasing in complexity, element by element, then species by species, always evolving into a higher state of vibration." -Julia, in The Celestine Prophecy, p240, ©1993 Warner Books-#1 best seller for many months. "Our secular age has led many people to feel demoralized and disillusioned, alienated from nature, regarding their existence as a pointless charade in an indifferent, even hostile, universe, a meaningless three-score years and ten on a remote planet wandering amid the vastness of an uncaring cosmos. Many of our social ills can be traced to the bleak worldview that three hundred years of mechanistic thought have imposed upon us..." -Paul Davies, in Physics and the Mind of God: The Templeton Prize Address, delivered May 3, 1995, at Westminster Abbey, quoted in First Things, Number 55, August/September 1995. "The experts don't know for sure how old or how big the universe is. They don't know what most of it is made of. They don't know in any detail how it began or how it will end." -TIME lead article, p78, 3/6/ 95 "I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has." -Malcolm Muggeridge, in The End of Christendom, ©1980 Eerdmans