Common Objections

Evolutionism is Science

Evolutionism is the light of the world

I am a Christian and an evolutionist

Darwin was a Christian

Science can not include God

Mi NOMA, Su NOMA

You say 'micro', I say 'macro'

Evolutionism has NOTHING to do with abiogenesis

'Evolutionism' is not a word

That's not what he meant

Evolutionism is Science

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. ~ Abraham Lincoln   See also: SMBC

The fact that there are scientists who appear to be at war with God is not quite the same as science itself being at war with God. For example, some musicians are militant atheists. But does that mean music itself is at war with God? Hardly. The point here may be expressed as follows: Statements by scientists are not necessarily statements of science. Nor, we might add, are such statements necessarily true; although the prestige of science is such that they are often taken to be so. ~ John Lennox 

Regardless of one's point of view, it's quite easy to see that Darwinism is not in the same league as the hard sciences. For instance, Darwinists will often compare their theory favorably to Einsteinian physics, claiming that Darwinism is just as well established as general relativity. Yet how many physicists, while arguing for the truth of Einsteinian physics, will claim that general relativity is as well established as Darwin’s theory? Zero.  ~ William Dembski

Through use and abuse of hidden postulates, of bold, often ill-founded extrapolations, a pseudoscience has been created. It is taking root in the very heart of biology and is leading astray many biochemists and biologists, who sincerely believe that the accuracy of fundamental concepts has been demonstrated, which is not the case.  ~ Pierre Grasse 

We must ask first whether the theory of evolution by natural selection is scientific or pseudoscientific .... Taking the first part of the theory, that evolution has occurred, it says that the history of life is a single process of species-splitting and progression. This process must be unique and unrepeatable, like the history of England. This part of the theory is therefore a historical theory, about unique events, and unique events are, by definition, not part of science, for they are unrepeatable and so not subject to test. ~ Colin Patterson

To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story -- amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific. ~ Henry Gee 

The domain of origin science was taken over by operation science. Even the unique, unrepeated events of the origin of the universe, of life, and of new life forms were treated as though the were observed regularities in the present. The difference between unobserved past singularities (origin science) was obscured. The search for natural (secondary) caused for how the universe and life operate in the present was gradually extended to how they originated in the past. Overlooked was the fact that events of origin are not a recurring pattern of events against which a theory of origin can be tested. ~ Norman Geisler 

Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science -- the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. ~ Ernst Mayr

In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture. ~ Jerry Coyne

All too often, there is a slide from science to something more, and this slide goes unmentioned -- unrealized even.  ~ Michael Ruse

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? ~ Charles Darwin   see Exposition

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. ~  J.B.S. Haldane 

The very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. ~ Paul Davies

Modern science was conceived, and born, and flourished in the matrix of Christian theism. Only liberal doses of self-deception and double-think, I believe, will permit it to flourish in the context of Darwinian naturalism.  ~ Alvin Plantinga  

see also: Alvin Plantinga
see also: Michael Bumbulis
see also: Joe Carter
see also: Imagination as Science
see also: Theory or Fact
see also: Religion

Evolutionism is the light of the world

The Origin of Species converted the majority of its readers to a belief in Darwinian evolution. We must now ask whether this was an unadulterated benefit to biology and to mankind... I do not contest the fact that the advent of the evolutionary idea, due mainly to the Origin, very greatly stimulated biological research. But it appears to me that owing precisely to the nature of the stimulus, a great deal of this work was directed into unprofitable channels or devoted to the pursuit of will-o’- the-wisps. I am not the only biologist of this opinion. Darwin’s conviction that evolution is the result of natural selection, acting on small fortuitous variations, says Guyenot, was to delay the progress of investigations on evolution by half a century. Really fruitful researches on heredity did not begin until the rediscovery in 1900 of the fundamental work of Mendel, published in 1865 and owing nothing to the work of Darwin. ~  W.R. Thompson 

Truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all. ~ Jerry Coyne

In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all. ~ Marc Kirschner

Without using evolutionary theory, doctors and scientists have discovered vaccines (Jenner, in the 18th century, before Darwin was born), discovered that germs cause infectious diseases (Pasteur, in the 19th century, who ignored Darwin), discovered genes (Mendel, in the 19th century, who was a priest and not a supporter of Darwin’s theory), discovered antibiotics, and unraveled the secrets of the genetic code (the key to these discoveries was the discovery of the apparent design in the DNA double helix). Heart, liver, and kidney transplants, new treatments for cancer and heart disease, and a host of life-saving advances in medicine have been developed without input from evolutionary biologists. No Nobel prize in medicine has ever been awarded for work in evolutionary biology. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that the only contribution evolution has made to modern medicine is to take it down the horrific road of eugenics, which brought forced sterilization and bodily harm to many thousands of Americans in the early 1900s. That’s a contribution which has brought shame -- not advance -- to the medical field.

So ‘Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution?’ I wouldn’t. Evolutionary biology isn’t important to modern medicine. ~ Michael Egnor

see also: Piltdown

I am a Christian and an evolutionist

All we can say about such beliefs is, firstly, that they are superfluous and, secondly, that they assume the existence of the main thing we want to explain, namely, organized complexity. ~  Richard Dawkins

Evolutionism makes God superfluous. 

Occasionally, a scientist discouraged by the consistent failure of theories purporting to explain some problem like the first appearance of life will suggest that perhaps supernatural creation is a tenable hypothesis in this one instance. Sophisticated naturalists instantly recoil with horror, because they know that there is no way to tell God when he has to stop. If God created the first organism, then how do we know he didn't do the same thing to produce all those animal groups that appear so suddenly in the Cambrian rocks? Given the existence of a designer ready and willing to do the work, why should we suppose that random mutations and natural selection are responsible for such marvels of engineering as the eye and the wing? ~ Phillip Johnson 

God makes evolutionism superfluous.

see also: Evolutionism and Scripture 
see also: CMI

Darwin was a Christian

Annie's cruel death catalyzed all the doubts that Charles's reading of Newman, and his deeper scrutiny of religion had engendered. He had permanently lost all belief in a caring God, and would never again seek solace in religion. He carefully avoided any direct statement in both his public and private writings, so we do not know his inner resolutions. I suspect that he accepted Huxley's dictum about agnosticism as the only intellectually valid position, while privately embracing a strong (and, as he well knew, quite unprovable) suspicion of atheism, galvanized by Annie's senseless death.   ~ Stephen Jay Gould

It is apparent that Darwin lost his faith in the years 1836-39, much of it clearly prior to the reading of Malthus. In order not to hurt the feelings of his friends and of his wife, Darwin often used deistic language in his publications, but much in his Notebooks indicates that by this time he had become a ‘materialist’ (more or less = atheist). ~ Ernst Mayr

I should prefer the part or volume not to be dedicated to me (although I thank you for the intended honour), as that would, in a certain extent, suggest my approval of the whole work, with which I am not acquainted. Although I am a keen advocate of freedom of opinion in all questions, it seems to me (rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and Theism hardly have any effect on the public; and that freedom of thought will best be promoted by that gradual enlightening of human understanding which follows the progress of science. I have therefore always avoided writing about religion and have confined myself to science. Possibly I have been too strongly influenced by the thought of the concern it might cause some members of my family, if in any way I lent my support to direct attacks on religion.    Letter to Edward Aveling (Son-in-Law of Karl Marx)  October 13, 1880

Last night Dicey and Litchfield were talking about J. Stuart Mill's never expressing his religious convictions, as he was urged to do so by his father. Both agreed strongly that if he had done so, he would never have influenced the present age in the manner in which he has done. His books would not have been text books at Oxford, to take a weaker instance. Lyell is most firmly convinced that he has shaken the faith in the Deluge far more efficiently by never having said a word against the Bible, than if he had acted otherwise.     Letter to George Darwin  October 1873

I have lately read Morley's Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the wonderful force and vigor of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect: real good seems only to follow the slow and silent side attacks.     Letter to George Darwin  October 1873

Many years ago I was strongly advised by a friend never to introduce anything about religion in my works, if I wished to advance science in England; and this led me not to consider the mutual bearings of the two subjects. Had I foreseen how much more liberal the world would become, I should perhaps have acted differently.     Cambridge Manuscripts cited by Gertrude Himmelfarb in Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution  (1967)  p.383

Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlasting punished. 

And this is a damnable doctrine.    Autobiography of Charles Darwin  (1958)  p.87

Before I was engaged to be married, my father advised me to conceal carefully my doubts, for he said that he had known extreme misery thus caused with married persons.    Autobiography of Charles Darwin  (1958)  p.95

See also: The Reluctant Mr Darwin

Science can not include God

Let us begin from God, and show that our pursuit from its exceeding goodness clearly proceeds from him, the Author of good and Father of light.  ~ Francis Bacon  

My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.  ~ Alfred North Whitehead  

It is hard to see how anything like a reasonably serious dispute about what is and isn't science could be settled just by appealing to a definition. One thinks this would work only if the original query were really a verbal question -- a question like: Is the English word 'science' properly applicable to a hypothesis that makes reference to God? But that wasn't the question. The question is instead: Could a hypothesis that makes reference to God be part of science? That question can't be answered just by citing a definition.  ~ Alvin Plantinga 

Of course the argument form 

If X were true, it would be inconvenient for science; therefore, X is false 

is at best moderately compelling. We aren’t just given that the Lord has arranged the universe for the comfort and convenience of the National Academy of Science. To think otherwise is to be like the drunk who insisted on looking for his lost car keys under the streetlight, on the grounds that the light was better there. (In fact it would go the drunk one better: it would be to insist that because the keys would be hard to find in the dark, they must be under the light.)   ~ Alvin Plantinga 

But even if it were true by definition that a scientific hypothesis could involve no reference to God, nothing of much interest would follow. The Augustines and Kuypers of this world would then be obliged to concede that they had made a mistake: but the mistake would be no more than a verbal mistake. They would have to concede that they can't properly use the term 'science' in stating their view or asking their question; they would have to use some other term, such as 'sience' (pronounced like 'science'); the definition of 'sience' results from that of 'science' by deleting from the latter the clause proscribing hypotheses that include reference to God (i.e., by removing from the definition of 'science' Ruse seems to be endorsing, the clause according to which science deals only with what is natural). Their mistake would not be in what they proposed to say, but rather in how they proposed to say it.  ~ Alvin Plantinga 

Is the conclusion that the universe was designed -- and that the design extends deeply into life -- science, philosophy, religion, or what? In a sense it hardly matters. By far the most important question is not what category we place it in, but whether a conclusion is true. A true philosophical or religious conclusion is no less true than a true scientific one. Although universities might divide their faculty and courses into academic categories, reality is not obliged to respect such boundaries.  ~ Michael Behe  

We need to realize that methodological naturalism is the functional equivalent of a full blown metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism asserts that the material world is all there is (in the words of Carl Sagan, "the cosmos is all there ever was, is, or will be"). Methodological naturalism asks us for the sake of science to pretend that the material world is all there is. But once science comes to be taken as the only universally valid form of knowledge within a culture, it follows at once that methodological and metaphysical naturalism become for all intents and purposes indistinguishable. They are functionally equivalent. What needs to be done, therefore, is to break the grip of naturalism in both guises, methodological and metaphysical. And this happens once we realize that it was not empirical evidence, but the power of a metaphysical world view that was all along urging us to adopt methodological naturalism in the first place.  ~ William Dembski

The problem with scientific naturalism as a worldview is that it takes a sound methodological premise of natural science and transforms it into a dogmatic statement about the nature of the universe. Science is committed by definition to empiricism, by which I mean that scientists seek to find truth by observation, experiment, and calculation rather than by studying sacred books or achieving mystical states of mind. It may well be, however, that there are certain questions -- important questions, ones to which we desperately want to know the answers -- that cannot be answered by the methods available to our science. These may include not only broad philosophical issues such as whether the universe has a purpose, but also questions we have become accustomed to think of as empirical, such as how life first began or how complex biological systems were put together. ~ Phillip Johnson 

For scientific materialist the materialism comes first; the science comes thereafter. We might therefore more accurately term them "materialists employing science." And if materialism is true, then some materialistic theory of evolution has to be true simply as a matter of logical deduction, regardless of the evidence. ~ Phillip Johnson 

"But, don't you see," said I, "that science never could show anything of the sort?"

"Why on earth not?"

"Because science studies Nature. And the question is whether anything besides Nature exists-anything 'outside.' How could you find that out by studying simply Nature?"

"But don't we find out that Nature must work in an absolutely fixed way? I mean, the Laws of Nature tell us not merely how things do happen, but how they must happen. No power could possibly alter them."

"How do you mean?" said I.

"Look here," said he. "Could this 'something outside' that you talk about make two and two five?"

"Well, no," said I.

"All right," said he. "Well, I think the Laws of Nature are really like two and two making four. The idea of their being altered is as absurd as the idea of altering the laws of arithmetic."

"Half a moment," said I. "Suppose you put sixpence into a drawer today, and sixpence into the same drawer tomorrow. Do the laws of arithmetic make it certain you'll find a shilling's worth there the day after?"

"Of course," said he, "provided no one's been tampering with your drawer."

"Ah, but that's the whole point," said I. "The laws of arithmetic can tell you what you'll find, with absolute certainty, provided that there's no interference. If a thief has been at the drawer of course you'll get a different result. But the thief won't have broken the laws of arithmetic-only the laws of England. Now, aren't the Laws of Nature much in the same boat? Don't they all tell you what will happen provided there's no interference?"

"How do you mean?"

"Well, the laws will tell you how a billiard ball will travel on a smooth surface if you hit it in a particular way-but only provided no one interferes. If, after it's already in motion, someone snatches up a cue and gives it a biff on one side- why, then, you won't get what the scientist predicted."

"No, of course not. He can't allow for monkey tricks like that."

"Quite, and in the same way, if there was anything outside Nature, and if it interfered-then the events which the scientist expected wouldn't follow. That would be what we call a miracle. In one sense it wouldn't break the laws of Nature. The laws tell you what will happen if nothing interferes. They can't tell you whether something is going to interfere. I mean, it's not the expert at arithmetic who can tell you how likely someone is to interfere with the pennies in my drawer; a detective would be more use. It isn't the physicist who can tell you how likely I am to catch up a cue and spoil his experiment with the billiard ball; you'd better ask a psychologist. And it isn't the scientist who can tell you how likely Nature is to be interfered with from outside. You must go to the metaphysician."  ~ C.S. Lewis  

Scientists committed to philosophical naturalism do not claim to have found the precise answer to every problem, but they characteristically insist that they have the important problems sufficiently well in hand that they can narrow the field of possibilities to a set of naturalistic alternatives. Absent that insistence, they would have to concede that their commitment to naturalism is based upon faith rather than proof. Such a concession could be exploited by promoters of rival sources of knowledge, such as philosophy and religion, who would be quick to point out that faith in naturalism is no more "scientific" (i.e. empirically based) than any other kind of faith. ~ Phillip Johnson 

Creationists are disqualified from making a positive case, because science by definition is based upon naturalism. The rules of science also disqualify any purely negative argumentation designed to dilute the persuasiveness of the theory of evolution. Creationism is thus out of court and out of the classroom-before any consideration of evidence. Put yourself in the place of a creationist who has been silenced by that logic, and you may feel like a criminal defendant who has just been told that the law does not recognize so absurd a concept as "innocence."  ~ Phillip Johnson 

see also: Evolutionism and Atheism

Mi NOMA, Su NOMA

Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates on the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings and values -- subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Poor Doubting Thomas, at his crucial and eponymous moment, he acted in the most admirable way for one style of inquiry -- but in the wrong magisterium. He espoused the key principle of science while operating within the different magisterium of faith. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

The natural world cannot contradict scripture (for God, as author of both, cannot speak against himself.) So -- and now we come to the key point -- if some contradiction seems to emerge between a well-validated scientific result and a conventional reading of scripture, then we had better reconsider our exegesis, for the natural world does not lie, but words can convey many meanings, some allegorical or metaphorical. (If science clearly indicates an ancient world, then the "days" of creation must represent periods longer than twenty-four hours.) In this crucial sense, the magisteria become separate, and science holds sway over the factual character of the natural world. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Theology once occupied this realm of factual inquiry as well. We can hardly expect anyone to withdraw from so much territory without a struggle -- no matter how just and true the claim may be that such an apparent retreat can only strengthen the discipline. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

If Pius is arguing that we cannot entertain a theory about derivation of all modern humans from an ancestral population rather than through an ancestral individual (a potential fact) because such an idea would question the doctrine of original sin (a theological construct), then I would declare him out of line for letting the magisterium of religion dictate a conclusion with the magisterium of science. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized my stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle" -- operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

In any case, the belief that religion and science occupy separate magesteria is dishonest. It founders on the undeniable fact that religions still make claims about the world which, on analysis, turn out to be scientific claims. Moreover, religious apologists try to have it both ways, to eat their cake and have it. When talking to intellectuals, they carefully keep off science's turf, safe inside the separate and invulnerable religious magesterium. But when talking to a non-intellectual mass audience they make wanton use of miracle stories, which are blatant intrusions into scientific territory. The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, The Raising of Lazarus, the manifestations of Mary and the Saints around the Catholic world. Even the Old Testament miracles, all are freely used for religious propaganda, and very effective they are with an audience of unsophisticates and children. Even on of these miracle amounts to a scientific claim, a violation of the normal running of the natural world. Theologians, if they want to remain honest, should  make a choice. You can claim your own magisterium, separate from science's but still deserving of respect. But in that case you have to renounce miracles. Or you can keep your Lourdes and your miracles, and enjoy their huge recruiting potential among the uneducated. But then you must kiss goodbye to separate magesteria and your high-minded aspiration to converge on science. ~  Richard Dawkins

Whatever else they may say, those scientists who subscribe to the 'separate magesteria' school of thought should concede that the universe with a supernaturally intelligent creator is a very different kind of universe from one without. The difference between the two hypothetical universes could hardly be more fundamental in principle, even if it is not easy to test in practice. And it undermines the dictum that science must be completely silent about religion's central existence claim. The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if not in practice -- or not yet -- a decided one. ~  Richard Dawkins

When faced with miracle stories, Gould would presumably retort along the following lines. The whole point of NOMA is that it is a two-way bargain. The moment religion steps on science's turf and starts to meddle in the real world with miracles, it ceases to be religion in the sense that Gould is defending, and his amcabilis concordia is broken. Note, however, that miracle-free religion defended by Gould would not be recognized by most practicing theists in the pew or on the prayer mat. It would, indeed, be a grave disappointment to them. ~  Richard Dawkins

Gould described his own personal view as "agnostic," appropriately conciliatory in pursuit of NOMA. Did he treat his own scientific theories in a similarly agnostic way? Did he say he is an agnostic about the concept of punctuated equilibria, one of his favorite theories? ~ William Provine  

In attempting to refute my point, Gould resoundingly confirmed it. Science and religion are separate but equal in importance, he wrote, "because science treats factual reality, while religion struggles with human morality." That is naturalistic metaphysics in a nutshell, and its version of "separate but equal" means about what the same phrase did in the days of Jim Crow. The power to define "factual reality" is the power to govern the mind, and thus to confine "religion" within a naturalistic box. For example, a supposed command of God can hardly provide a basis for morality unless God really exists. The commands of an imaginary deity are merely human commands dressed of as divine law. Morality in naturalistic metaphysics is purely a human invention, as Gould conceded in the same review by remarking offhandedly that on questions of morality, "there is no 'natural law' waiting to be discovered 'out there'." Why not? The answer, of course, is that naturalistic metaphysics relegates both morality and God to the realm outside of scientific knowledge, where only subjective belief is to be found. ~ Phillip Johnson 

The worldview of scientific naturalism preserves a place for religious beliefs: a place, that is, among the things to be explained by science. The Christian religion thus enters the university with a status precisely equal to that of other comparable religious systems -- say, the Aztec system of human sacrifice. Any individual, even a person of eminence in science, can make a personal choice to "be religious." Such choices are made on the basis of "faith," meaning subjective preference. A problem arises only if the Aztecs or the Christians claim access to knowledge. If they do that, they are claiming that their own beliefs are normative for unbelievers. Only scientists can claim that kind of authority, because what is endorsed by the scientific community constitutes knowledge, not belief. That is why Darwinian evolution can be taught in the schools as fact, however strongly parents or students object, whereas a simple prayer acknowledging God as our Creator is deemed unacceptable -- because somebody might object. ~ Phillip Johnson   

Luke 19.37 And as He was now approaching, near the descent of the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the miracles which they had seen

John 10.32 Jesus answered them, "I showed you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you stoning Me?"37 "If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me; 38 but if I do them, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me, and I in the Father. "

Exodus 15.11 "Who is like Thee among the gods, O LORD? Who is like Thee, majestic in holiness, Awesome in praises, working wonders?

see also: Dallas Willard  2
see also: William Lane Craig

You say 'micro', I say 'macro'

Readers of my article and the responses may have noticed that where I attacked Darwinism and the establishment of naturalism, Thomas Jukes and William Provine responded with a spirited defense of evolution. The choice of words is important, because "evolution" is a vague term with immense power to confuse...The important claim of "evolution" is that life developed gradually from nonliving matter to its present state of diverse complexity through purposeless natural mechanisms that are known to science. Evolution in this sense is a grand metaphysical system..."Evolution" also designates some relatively modest modifications in biological populations that result from environmental pressures. Bacterial populations evolve resistance to antibiotics: evolution causes dark moths to preponderate over light moths when the background trees are darkened by smoke. These examples have nothing to do with whatever creative process formed bacteria and insects in the first place, but since the same word is used to designate both limited adaptive modification with fixed boundaries and the whole naturalistic metaphysical system, it is easy to give the impression that naturalistic evolution (all the way from microorganism to man) is a "fact."...To borrow Irving Kristol's prescription, "Our goal should be to have biology and evolution taught in a way that points to what we don't know as well as what we do." I would only add that it would help if we could get the science educators to define that word "evolution" precisely and use it consistently. ~ Phillip Johnson 

Microevolution within the species proceeds by accumulation of micromutations and occupation of the available ecological niches by the preadapted mutants. Microevolution, especially geographic variation, adapts the species to the different conditions existing in the available range of distribution. Microevolution does not lead beyond the confines of the species, and the typical products of microevolution, the geographic races, are not incipient species. Species and the higher categories originate in single macroevolutionary steps as completely new genetic systems. The genetical process which is involved consists of a repatterning of the chromosomes, which results in a new genetic system. The theory of genes and of the accumulation of micromutants by selection has to be ruled out of this picture.  ~ Richard Goldschmidt

Goldschmidt did not invent the words micro- and macroevolution, but he did popularize them. By microevolution, he referred to changes within local populations and geographic variation -- in short, to all evolutionary events occurring within species. Macroevolution designates the origin of species and higher taxa.  ~ Stephen Jay Gould    see also: Yuri Filipchenko

Among all the claims made during the evolutionary synthesis, perhaps the one that found least acceptance was the assertion that all phenomena of macroevolution can be ‘reduced to,' that is, explained by, microevolutionary genetic processes. Not surprisingly, this claim was usually supported by geneticists but was widely rejected by the very biologists who dealt with macroevolution, the morphologists and paleontologists. Many of them insisted that there is more or less complete discontinuity between the processes at the two levels—that what happens at the species level is entirely different from what happens at the level of the higher categories. Now, 50 years later the controversy remains undecided... By cleverly employing mathematics and making numerous arbitrary assumptions, one can develop macroevolutionary models based on beanbag genetics. However, there is no way to test these models for their validity. At the present moment, unfortunately, the genetics of microevolutionary processes has been unable to provide a full explanation of macroevolution, nor has the analysis of macroevolutionary phenomena provided any answers as to the nature of the genetic processes characterizing macroevolutionary events.  ~ Ernst Mayr  

Let us not confuse creative evolution with variations in the composition of a population through circumstances. They are two distinct things, and any attempt to connect them is purely specious.  ~ Pierre Grasse     

Anatomy may fluctuate over time, but the last remnants of a species usually look pretty much like the first representatives.  ~ Stephen Jay Gould 

The opposite truth has been affirmed by innumerable cases of measurable evolution at this minimal scale-but, to be visible at all over so short a span, evolution must be far too rapid (and transient) to serve as the basis for major transformations in geological time. Hence, the “paradox of the visibly irrelevant”-or, if you can see it at all, it’s too fast to matter in the long run. ~ Stephen Jay Gould 

But transient blips an fillips are no less important than major trends in the total “scheme of things.” Both represent evolution operating at a standard and appropriate measure for a particular scale and time -- Trinidadian blips for the smallest and most local moment, faces from fish to human for the largest and most global frame. One scale doesn’t translate into another... 

You may ignore Maine while studying the sand grain and be properly oblivious of the grain while perusing the single-page map of Maine

But you can love and learn from both scales at the same time. Evolution does not lie patent in a clear pond on Trinidad any more than the universe (pace Mr. Blake) lies revealed in a grain of sand. But how poor would be our understanding – how bland and restricted our sight – if we could not learn to appreciate the rococo details that fill our immediate fields of vision, while forming geology’s irrelevant and invisible jigglings. ~ Stephen Jay Gould 

The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear No.  ~ Roger Lewin 

see also: First CityWide
see also: Evidence
see also: Laurence Moran
see also: The Meanings of Evolution
see also: Stephen Jones

Evolutionism has NOTHING to do with abiogenesis

Hence without parent by spontaneous birth 
Rise the first specks of animated earth; 
~ Erasmus Darwin 

It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed. ~ Charles Darwin 

If it is ever found that life can originate on this world, the vital phenomena will come under some general law of nature. ~ Charles Darwin 

The principle of continuity renders it probable that the principle of life will hereafter be shown to be a part, or consequence of some general law. ~ Charles Darwin 

If it were given to me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the Earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions which it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from non-living matter. ~ Thomas Huxley

The origin of the first Monera by spontaneous generation appears to us as a simple and necessary event in the process of the development of the earth. ~  Ernst Haeckel  

The origin of life was necessarily the beginning of organic evolution and it is among the greatest of all evolutionary problems. ~ George Gaylord Simpson

Evolution, from cosmic star-dust to human society, is a comprehensive and continuous process. ~ Julian Huxley

We all believe, as an article of faith, that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did. ~ Harold Urey

The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative, to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position. For this reason many scientists a century ago chose to regard the belief in spontaneous generation as a "philosophical necessity." It is a symptom of the philosophical poverty of our time that this necessity is no longer appreciated. Most modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing. ~ George Wald   See also: Frank Sinatra 

Four billion years ago, the Earth was a molecular Garden of Eden. There were as yet no predators. Some molecules reproduced themselves inefficiently, competed for building blocks and left crude copies of themselves. With reproduction, mutation and the selective elimination of the least efficient varieties, evolution was well under way, even at the molecular level. ~ Carl Sagan

Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans. ~ Stephen Jay Gould 

It could be that the chemical origin of a self-replicating molecule (the necessary trigger for the origin of natural selection) was a relatively probable event. ~  Richard Dawkins

I understand three things by Darwinism. First the fact of evolution, namely that all organisms came through a long slow process of development -- a natural process -- from a few forms and ultimately from inorganic material. ~ Michael Ruse

Occasionally, a scientist discouraged by the consistent failure of theories purporting to explain some problem like the first appearance of life will suggest that perhaps supernatural creation is a tenable hypothesis in this one instance. Sophisticated naturalists instantly recoil with horror, because they know that there is no way to tell God when he has to stop. If God created the first organism, then how do we know he didn't do the same thing to produce all those animal groups that appear so suddenly in the Cambrian rocks? Given the existence of a designer ready and willing to do the work, why should we suppose that random mutations and natural selection are responsible for such marvels of engineering as the eye and the wing? ~ Phillip Johnson 

To press the matter further, if there were a basic principle of matter which somehow drove organic systems toward life, its existence should easily be demonstrable in the laboratory. One could, for instance, take a swimming bath to represent the primordial soup. Fill it with any chemicals of a non- biological nature you please. Pump any gases over it, or through it, you please, and shine any kind of radiation on it that takes your fancy. Let the experiment proceed for a year and see how many of those 2,000 enzymes have appeared in the bath. I will give the answer, and so save the time and trouble and expense of actually doing the experiment. You would find nothing at all, except possibly for a tarry sludge composed of amino acids and other simple organic chemicals. How can I be so confident of this statement? Well, if it were otherwise, the experiment would long since have been done and would be well known and famous throughout the world. The cost of it would be trivial compared to the cost of landing a man on the Moon... In short there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on Earth. ~ Fred Hoyle 

At all events, anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the near-impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cube faces at random. Now imagine 10⁵⁰ blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order. ~ Fred Hoyle

There are indeed a lot of stars -- at least ten billion billion in the observable universe. But this number, gigantic as it may appear to us, is nevertheless trivially small compared with the gigantic odds against the random assembly of even a single protein molecule. ~ Paul Davies

Like Sisyphus, those trying to discover the origins of life and study the earliest stages of biological evolution have an uphill quest: Over and over it happens that a theory or explanation believed to be well established has to be abandoned or rethought in the light of new findings.  ~ Antonio Lazcano

The short answer is we don't really know how life originated on this planet. There have been a variety of experiments that tell us some possible roads, but we remain in substantial ignorance.  ~ Andrew Knoll

Many investigators feel uneasy stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they admit they are baffled. ~ Paul Davies  See also: Sidney Harris

Nobody understands the origin of life. If they say they do, they are probably trying to fool you. ~  Kenneth Nealson

See also: The RNA World
See also: The Mystery of Life's Origin  2  
See also: Graham Cairns-Smith
See also: Intelligent Design
See also: Barry Arrington
See also: Stephen Jones
See also: CreationWiki  2
See also: Telic Thoughts
See also: Bathybius

'Evolutionism' is not a word

It remains that I should put before you what I understand to be the third phase of geological speculation -- namely EVOLUTIONISM. ~ Thomas Huxley

But the analysis of change and continuity is not a problem upon which either physics or biology throws any light: it is a problem of a new kind, belonging to a different kind of study. The question whether evolutionism offers a true or a false answer to this problem is not, therefore, a question to be solved by appeals to particular facts, such as biology and physics reveal. In assuming dogmatically a certain answer to this question, evolutionism ceases to be scientific yet it is only in touching on this question that evolutionism reaches the subject-matter of philosophy. Evolutionism thus consist of two parts: one not philosophical, but only a hasty generalization of the kind which the special sciences might hereafter confirm of confute; the other not scientific, but a mere unsupported dogma, belonging to philosophy by its subject-matter, but in no way deducible from the facts upon which evolutionism relies.  ~ Bertrand Russell

It is important to point out that laws and trends are radically different things. There is little doubt that the habit of confusing trends with laws, together with the intuitive observation of trends (such as technical progress), inspired the central doctrines of evolutionism and historicism - the doctrines of the inexorable laws of biological evolution and the irreversible laws of motion of society. ~ Karl Popper

I want to consider the way in which these two alternative world views-evolutionism and creationism have affected or might affect systematics and systematists.

Gillespie's book is a historian's attempt explain the amount of space that Darwin gave to combating the creationist arguments. Gillespie shows that what Darwin was doing was trying to replace the creationist paradigm by a positivist paradigm, a view of the world in which there was neither room nor necessity for final causes. Of course, Gillespie takes it for granted that Darwin and his disciples succeeded in this task. He takes it for granted that a rationalist view of nature has replaced an irrational one and of course, I myself took that view about eighteen months ago. Then I woke up and realized that all my life I had been duped into taking evolutionism as revealed truth in some way.  ~ Colin Patterson

Since the shift from a strict belief in creation to one in evolution requires a profound conceptual -- indeed, ideological -- reorientation, one must consider Darwin's attitude toward Christianity. No fundamentalist can develop a theory of evolution, and the changes in the nature of Darwin's faith are, therefore, highly relevant for our understanding of his conversion to evolutionism.  ~ Ernst Mayr

I believe that Owen had, for more than a decade before the Origin appeared, accepted a limited form of evolution -- within archetypes, and along channels preordained by archetypal constraints. He never accepted global transmutation, for his brand of limited evolution could not generate the archetypes themselves...Owen despised the extent and character of Darwin's evolutionism, but not the idea of evolution itself. ~ Stephen Jay Gould 

My qualifications for writing this kind of book are twofold. First, I have spent a number of years teaching the history of evolutionism at various levels in universities in three different countries (Canada, Malaysia, and the United Kingdom). This, I hope, has given me some insight into the difficulties of presenting the essence of complex intellectual developments to students unfamiliar with the field. Second, I have published -- originally by accident and later by design -- research in most areas of the history of evolutionism from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.  ~ Peter Bowler  

Inherit the Wind took many liberties in telling the tale, shaping the clash to reflect concerns of the 1950s rather than the 1920s -- specifically the right to have contrary opinions which, thanks to the Cold War, Americans were under great pressure to conform to general norms of behavior and thought. In the real Scopes Trial, evolution -- particularly human evolution -- was certainly at the center of the debate, but the true issue was more the general philosophy for which evolution was taken to stand. Evolutionism rather than mere evolution.  ~ Michael Ruse

see also: All About Philosophy
see also: Dictionary.com
see also: Wikipedia
see also: NCSE

That's not what he meant

Evolutionists have often protested ‘unfair’ to quoting an evolutionist as if he were against evolution itself. So let it be said from the outset that the vast majority of authorities quoted are themselves ardent believers in evolution. But that is precisely the point... The foundations of the evolutionary edifice are hardly likely to be shaken by a collection of quotes from the many scientists who are biblical creationists. In a court of law, an admission from a hostile witness is the most valuable. Quoting the evolutionary palaeontologist who admits the absence of in-between forms, or the evolutionary biologist who admits the hopelessness of the mutation/selection mechanism, is perfectly legitimate if the admission is accurately represented in its own right, regardless of whether the rest of the article is full of hymns of praise to all the other aspects of evolution.  ~ Andrew Snelling 

see also: Stephen Jones
see also: Misquotes 
see also: Are Creationists Honest? 

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