Quotes about Darwin

The core of the evolution controversy can thus be phrased in simple terms: Did mind create matter? Or did matter give rise to mind? According to a theistic worldview, mind is primary. It is the fundamental creative force in the universe (whether God created the world quickly by fiat or slowly by a gradual process). Darwin reversed things. According to his theory, matter is the primary creative force, and mind emerged only very late in evolutionary history.10

Either we "keep faith with Darwin" and embrace postmodernism, or we keep faith with a personal God who is not silent—whose Logos is the source of unified, universal, capital-T Truth.

He [William Jennings Bryan] recognized that what Darwin proposed on the biological level, when applied on the societal level, might legitimize an ideology that supports the survival of the fittest, with all of its dire complications. Byran was able to envision the kind of society that Social Darwinism would create- the kind of exploitation that comes from unbridled capitalism, for instance- and chose to war against it.

Darwin was led to his agnostic naturalism as much by the misery which he observed in the world as by the facts which scientific investigation brought under his notice. There was too much strife and injustice in the world for him to believe in providence and a predetermined goal. A world so full of cruelty and pain he could not reconcile with the omniscience, the omnipotence, the goodness of God.

Imagine—this gangly plant, which Darwin likened to a duckbill platypus of the vegetable kingdom, has survived as a species, unchanged, for 135 to 205 million years. Originally its habitat was lush, moist forest, yet it has now adapted to a very different environment—the harsh Namib Desert.

Evolution itself is an "order" that requires explanation if any order does, and it presupposes, as we have just seen, a vast scale of order and existence within which alone it can occur. Whether evolution occurs with regard to plant and animal species (which was Darwin's concern), that has no serious implications at all, taken by itself, for the existence of God.

Darwin's own evidence was confined to variations WITHIN the KIND (Genesis 1:25), i.e. beak variations within Galapagos finches.

Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.

Yes, the world has been different ever since Darwin. But no less exciting, instructing, or uplifting; for if we cannot find purpose in nature, we will have to define it for ourselves.

Darwin paid particular attention to disconfirming evidence. Objectivity maintenance routines are totally required in life if you're going to be a great thinker.

It's true that Darwin didn't live the optimally utilitarian life. No one ever has. Still, as he prepared to die, he could rightly have reflected on a life decently and compassionately lived, a string of duties faithfully discharged, a painful, if only partial, struggle against the currents of selfishness whose source he was the first man to see. It wasn't a perfect life; but human beings are capable of worse.

To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler. Hitler tried to speed up evolution, to help it along, and millions suffered and died in unspeakable ways because of it.