From Theodosius Dobzhansky, the famous geneticist and an Orthodox Christian:
“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.” (Dobzhansky, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” American Biology Teacher, March 1973)
Biologist Darrel Falk, an evangelical Christian who teaches at a Nazarene university, in his wonderful book Coming to Peace with Science (Intervarsity Press, 2004) has stated:
“The fact is that Christianity has core beliefs that are not accessible to the scientific method…The resurrection, existence of the Holy Spirit and immortality are all beyond the realm of scientific testability. Even testing the power of prayer will probably not bring scientists to their knees. The history of life on earth, however, is in a much different category. It has been possible to explore this using scientific methods…For the past century and a half, thousands of scientists from disciplines as diverse as physics, geology, astronomy and biology have amassed a tremendous mass of data, and the answer is absolutely clear and equally certain. The earth is not young, and the life forms did not appear in six twenty-four-hour days. God created gradually…We now know more about the nature of divine action. We now know a little about how God created life, and any time we understand something new about the activity of God, it brings us one step closer to God.” (Falk, Coming to Peace with Science: Bridging the Worlds Between Faith and Biology, page 213, 214)
Biologist Kenneth Miller, a self-described “orthodox Catholic and orthodox Darwinist” writes on creationism or “creation science” :
“In order to defend God against the challenge they see from evolution, they have had to make Him into a schemer, a trickster, even a charlatan. Their version of God is one who intentionally plants misleading clues beneath our feet and in the heavens themselves. Their version of God is one who has filled the universe with so much bogus evidence that the tools of science can give us nothing more than a phony version of reality. In other words, their God has negated science by rigging the universe with fiction and deception. To embrace that God, we must reject science and worship deception itself…One can, of course, imagine a Creator who could have produced all of the illusions that the creationists claim to find in nature. In order to do so, we must simultaneously conclude that science can tell us nothing about nature, and that the Creator to whom many of us pray is inherently deceitful. Such so-called creation science, thoroughly analyzed, corrupts both science and religion, and it deserves a place in the intellectual wastebasket.” (Kenneth Miller, Finding Darwin’s God [1999], page 80)
And finally, Mike Behe the “champion” of intelligent design freely admits –
“The point I’m trying to drive home here by discussing my own work as well as the work of [Kenneth] Miller and [John] Haught, is that
a very wide range of views about the mechanism of evolution is consistent with Catholic teaching, from the natural selection defended by [Kenneth] Miller, to the intelligent design I have proposed, to the animated, information-suffused universe that John Haught sees. Those mechanisms are all proposed by persons who attach the same bottom-line philosophy to their ideas that Pope John Paul described: that ‘it is the God of Israel who acts’ and that ‘it is the one and the same God who establishes and guarantees the intelligibility and reasonableness of the natural order of things upon which scientists confidently depend, and who reveals himself as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Indeed, the range of possibilities that are available under a Catholic viewpoint is much wider than under a materialistic viewpoint.” (Michael Behe, from “A Catholic Scientist Looks at Darwinism” in Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing edited by William Dembski [2004], page 143-144)
All quotes from my articles here
Phil P
). This doesn’t fly with the scientific community who prefer to leave God out of the equation as much as possible. For them (non-ID), on the whole, it arose by chance. For the ID advocates, it was God who did it, since they find it highly improbable. But if you’re going to go the extra mile and not associate yourself with the ID’ers then you’re basically asking me to accept the idea that such complexity arose all at once purely by chance, and that many genes turned ‘on’ and ‘off’ to give the next organism a wholly new form as Stephen Jay Gould postulated through his idea of ‘punctuated equilibria’ because a gradual method of only growing new organs a small percentage at a time, overtime, doesn’t cut it.
