Was Darwin Right

Introduction. In his book Darwin's Black Box, Prof. Michael Behe comments that there have always been since the time of Darwin, well informed and respected scientists who have found Darwinism to be inadequate (page 30).

However, people who hold to a belief that God could have been involved in creating life on Earth can be open to ridicule. They can be considered bigoted, narrow minded, old fashioned, extremist, stupid or just unscientific. Below under specific headings are some quotes from scientists that do not agree with the generally accepted view of the theory of evolution being almost fact.

It should be noted, that these quotes do not imply that the scientists themselves do not agree with the theory of evolution, merely that the particular quote does no go along with the generally accepted view of origins. For example, Francis Crick was an atheist, however, his concerns quoted below of a particular protein of two hundred amino acids being selected by chance as being 10²⁶⁰ is considered relevant to the arguments of this site. In the quote below, Crick says to "To produce this miracle of molecular construction........". In his own words, regardless of whether he was an atheist or not, he still (at least in this quote) considered the origin of life a "miracle".

Over 800 Scientists with at least a PhD have signed a dissent from Darwinism statement.

The Privileged Planet - The Search For Purpose In The Universe

"There are an increasing number of observational facts which are difficult to reconcile in the Big-Bang hypothesis. The Big Bang establishment very seldom mentions these, and when non-believers try to draw attention to them, the powerful establishment refuses to discuss them in a fair way...". Hannes Olof Gösta Alfven (Nobel prize for Physics in 1970). "Cosmology: Myth or Science?" in Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy 5 (1970), p. 1203.

[The Big Bang] “…represents the instantaneous suspension of physical laws, the sudden, abrupt flash of lawlessness that allowed something to come out of nothing. It represents a true miracle---transcending physical principles….” Paul Davies, The Edge of Infinity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), p161.

[The Big Bang] “…is only a myth that attempts to say how the universe came into being….” Hannes Alfvén (Nobel prize for Physics in 1970). “The Big Bang Never Happened,” Discover 9 (June 1988), p. 78. To top

"To produce this miracle of molecular construction all the cell need do is to string together the amino acids (which make up the polypeptide chain) in the correct order. This is a complicated biochemical process, a molecular assembly line, using instructions in the form of a nucleic acid tape (the so-called messenger RNA). Here we need only ask, how many possible proteins are there? If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare of an event would that be?
This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is, if anything, rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is conveniently written 20²⁰⁰, that is a one followed by 260 zeros!
This number is quite beyond our everyday comprehension. For comparison, consider the number of fundamental particles (atoms, speaking loosely) in the entire visible universe, not just in our own galaxy with its 10¹¹ stars, but in all the billions of galaxies, out to the limits of observable space. This number, which is estimated to be 10⁸⁰, is quite paltry by comparison to 10²⁶⁰. Moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of a rather modest length. Had we considered longer ones as well, the figure would have been even more immense." Francis Crick, [Crick received a Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA.] Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature (1981), pp 51-52.

"Even with DNA sequence data we have no direct access to the processes of evolution, so objective reconstruction of the vanished past can be achieved only by creative imagination." -- N. Takahata, A General Perspective on the Origin & History of Humans, Annual Reviews of Ecology & Systematics, 1995.

good fit again." Albert Szent-Györgyi von Nagyrapolt (Nobel prize for Medicine in 1937). "Drive in Living Matter to Perfect Itself," Synthesis I, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 18 (1977) [winner of two Nobel Prizes for scientific research and Director of Research at the Institute for Muscle Research in Massachusetts].

"The development of the metabolic system, which, as the primordial soup thinned, must have "learned" to mobilize chemical potential and to synthesize the cellular components, poses Herculean problems. So also does the emergence of the selectively permeable membrane without which there can be no viable cell. But the major problem is the origin of the genetic code and of its translation mechanism. Indeed, instead of a problem it ought rather to be called a riddle. The code is meaningless unless translated. The modern cell's translating machinery consists of at least fifty macromolecular components which are themselves coded in DNA: the code cannot be translated otherwise than by products of translation. It is the modern _expression of omne vivum ex ovo [everything that lives, (comes) from an egg]. When and how did this circle become closed? It is exceedingly difficult to imagine." Jacques Monod (Nobel prize for Medicine in 1965, biochemist, Director, Pasteur Institute, France. "Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology", [1971], Transl. Wainhouse A., Penguin Books: London, 1997, reprint, pp.142-143. Emphasis in original). To top

"The real question is whether we have enough imagination to reconstruct their lives [the lives of early humans]." -- Robert Blumenschine, paleo-anthropologist of Rutgers University in a 1989 U.S. News and World Report cover story.

"The vast majority of artist's conceptions are based more on imagination than on evidence..........Artists must create something between an ape and a human being; the older the specimen is said to be, the more ape-like they make it." - "Anthro Art", Science Digest April 1981 pg 41.

"No-one can be sure just what any extinct hominoid looked like." Donald C Johnson and Maitland A Edey, Lucy: The beginnings of Humankind (1981) p 286.

"The main problem in reconstructing the origins of man is lack of fossil evidence: all there is could be displayed on a dinner table." - New Scientist 20 May 1982 pg 491.

"Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations. Fossil evidence of chimpanzee evolution is absent altogether". (Henry Gee, Nature vol. 412 p. 131, 2001).

"If pressed about man's ancestry, I would have to unequivocally say that all we have is a huge question mark. To date, there has been nothing found to truthfully purport as a transitional specie to man, including Lucy, since 1470 was as old and probably older. If further pressed, I would have to state that there is more evidence to suggest an abrupt arrival of man rather than a gradual process of evolving". Richard Leakey, world's foremost paleo-anthropologist, in a PBS documentary, 1990. To top

"Why then is not every geological formation full of such intermediate links. Geology assuredly does not reveal any finely graduated organic change, and this is the most obvious and serious objection that can be urged against the theory". (Darwin, Origin Of The Species).

Evolutionist David Raup, Curator of Geology at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History said:- "The evidence we find in the geological record is not nearly as compatible with Darwinian natural selection as we would like it to be ....We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than in Darwin's time ... so Darwin's problem has not been alleviated". (Raup, Field museum of Natural History Bulletin).

and also said:- "A large number of well trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: low level textbooks, semi-popular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years after Darwin , his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been found yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks...". Raup, D. (1981). New Scientist, Vol. 90. p. 832.

"With few exceptions, radically new kinds of organisms appear for the first time in the fossil record already fully evolved, with most of their characteristic features present". Dr T S Kemp, Curator of Zoological collections, Oxford University (Kemp, 1999. Fossils and evolution, p. 253).

Steven Stanley, an affirmed evolutionist, was objective enough to point out:- “The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that a gradualistic model can be valid.” Steven M. Stanley, Macroevolution: Pattern and Process. San Francisco: W. M. Freeman & Co., 1979, p. 39.

George Gaylord Simpson, another leading evolutionist, sees this characteristic in practically the whole range of taxonomic categories:- "...Every palaeontologist knows that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of family appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.” George Gaylord Simpson (evolutionist), The Major Features of Evolution, New York, Columbia University Press, 1953 p. 360.

Speaking of the Cambrian fauna, there are many that still survive, all looking much like they did over 500 million years ago. The prominent British evolutionists, Richard Dawkins, has made the following comment: "And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists". Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton Co., 1987). To top

"Thus, a walk though the Grand Canyon then, is not like a walk though evolutionary time; instead it's like a walk from the bottom of the ocean, across the tidal zone, over the shore, across the lowlands and into the upland regions". (Dr Gary Parker, c. 2000 - Creation facts of life). To top

"The only certainty in this data-poor, imagination-rich, endlessly fascinating field is that there are plenty of surprises left to come". Michael Lemonick, "How Man Began", Time, March 14, 1994. To top

"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a phantasy". Charles Darwin, Life and Letters, 1887, Vol. 2, p. 229. To top

"The percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005. Meanwhile the fraction of Americans unsure about evolution has soared from 7 per cent in 1985 to 21 per cent last year". Science 2006, vol 313 p765. To top

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God." Albert Einstein (Nobel prize for Physics in 1921). Calaprice, Alice: The Quotable Einstein (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1996).

"Although a biologist, I must confess I do not understand how life came about... I consider that life only starts at the level of a functional cell. The most primitive cells may require at least several hundred different specific biological macro-molecules. How such already quite complex structures may have come together, remains a mystery to me. The possibility of the existence of a Creator, of God, represents to me a satisfactory solution to this problem." Werner Arber (Nobel for Medicine in 1978) a quote from Henry Margenau & Ray Abraham Varghese, eds., "Cosmos, Bios, Theos: Scientists Reflect on Science, God and the Origin of the Universe, Life and Homo Sapiens" /LaSalle, IL, USA: Open Court, 1992, p. 142.

"The more we know about the cosmos and evolutionary biology, the more they seem inexplicable without some aspect of [intelligent] design," Townes asserts. "And for me that inspires faith." Charles Hard Townes (Nobel prize for Physics in 1964). Greg Easterbrook "Of lasers and prayer" w Science, Vol. 277, 15 August 1997.

"I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution." George Wald (Nobel prize for Medicine in 1967). George Wald, "Frontiers of Modern Biology on Theories of Origin of Life" (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), p. 187.

"When it comes to the origin of life on this earth, there are only two possibilities: Creation or spontaneous generation. There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was disproved 100 years ago, but that leads us only to one other conclusion: that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds therefore, we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance." George Wald (Nobel prize for Medicine in 1967).

"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle." Francis Crick, [Crick received a Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA.] Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature (1981), p. 88.

“I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science.” Rocket scientist Wernher von Braun as quoted by James Perloff, Tornado in a Junkyard (Arlington, Massachusetts: Refuge Books, 1999), p. 253.

"The irony is devastating. The main purpose of Darwinism was to drive every last trace of an incredible God from biology. But the theory replaces God with an even more incredible deity - omnipotent chance." T. Rosazak, "Unfinished Animal", 1975, p. 101-102.

In his lecture Ordinary Faith, Ordinary Science, delivered at the conference “Science and the Spiritual Quest” (20 April 2002, Paris ), Dr. William Phillips said: “Many scientists are also people with quite conventional religious faith. I, a physicist, am one example. I believe in God as both creator and friend. That is, I believe that God is personal and interacts with us.” William Phillips – Nobel prize for Physics in 1997. (W. Phillips, Ordinary Faith, Ordinary Science: А public lecture at the conference “Science and the Spiritual Quest II”. April 20, 2002; Interdisciplinary University of Paris . UNESCO World Headquarters, Salle 1, Paris ).

Einstein on God:- The university professor challenged his students with this question: "Did God create everything that exists?"
A student bravely replied "Yes, he did!"
"God created everything?" the professor asked.
"Yes sir," the student replied.
The professor answered, "If God created everything, then God created evil since evil exists, and according to the principal that our works define who we are, then God is evil."
The professor was quite pleased with himself and boasted to the students that he had proven once more that the Christian faith was a myth.
Another student raised his hand and said, "Can I ask you a question professor?"
"Of course," replied the professor.
The student stood up and asked, "Professor, does cold exist?"
The professor replied "Of course it exists. Have you never been cold?"
The students snickered at the young man's question.
The young man replied, "In fact sir, cold does not exist. According to the laws of physics, what we consider cold is in reality the absence of heat. Everybody or object is susceptible to study when it has or transmits energy, and heat is what makes a body, or matter, have or transmit energy. Absolute zero (- 460 degrees F) is the total absence of heat. Cold does not exist. We have created this word to describe how we feel if we have no heat."
The student continued. "Professor, does darkness exist?"
The professor responded, "Of course it does."
The student replied, "Once again you are wrong sir. Darkness does not exist either. Darkness is in reality the absence of light. Light, we can study, but not darkness. In fact we can use Newton's prism to break white light into many colors and study the various wavelengths of each color. You cannot measure darkness. A simple ray of light can break into a world of darkness and illuminate it. How can you know how dark a certain space is? You measure the amount of light present. Isn't this correct? Darkness is a term used by man to describe what happens when there is no light present."
Finally the young man asked the professor. "Sir, does evil exist?"
Now uncertain, the professor responded, "Of course, as I have already said. We see it every day. It is in the daily example of man's inhumanity to man. It is in the multitude of crime and violence everywhere in the world. These manifestations are nothing else but evil."
To this the student replied, "Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart. It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light."
The professor sat down. The young man's name --- Albert Einstein.

Einstein’s attitude towards Jesus Christ was expressed in an interview:-
“To what extent are you influenced by Christianity? - "As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene."
Have you read Emil Ludwig’s book on Jesus?- "Emil Ludwig’s Jesus is shallow. Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot."
You accept the historical Jesus?- "Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”
Einstein, as cited in George Viereck, “What Life Means to Einstein,” in The Saturday Evening Post, 26 October 1929, Philadelphia: The Curtis Publishing Company. To top

"I just cannot believe that everything developed by random mutations.........". (Dr Dennis Gabor, winner of 1971 Noble peace prize in Science).

Professor Pierre-Paul Grasse, past president of the French Acadamy of sciences has said:- "No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution". (Grasse, P. P., 1977).

"To postulate that the development and survival of the fittest is entirely a consequence of chance mutations seems to me a hypothesis based on no evidence and irreconcilable with the facts. These classical evolutionary theories are a gross over-simplification of an immensely complex and intricate mass of facts, and it amazes me that they are swallowed so uncritically and so readily, by so many scientist without a murmur of protest". Sir Ernest Chain, co-holder of 1945 Nobel prize for developing penicillin.

"Most biological reactions are chain reactions. To interact in a chain, these precisely built molecules must fit together most precisely, as the cog wheels of a Swiss watch do. But if this is so, then how can such a system develop at all? For if any one of the specific cog wheels in these chains is changed, then the whole system must simply become inoperative. Saying it can be improved by random mutation of one link, is like saying you could improve a Swiss watch by dropping it and thus bending one of its wheels or axes. To get a better watch, all the wheels must be changed simultaneously to make a good fit again." Albert Szent-Györgyi von Nagyrapolt (Nobel prize for Medicine in 1937). "Drive in Living Matter to Perfect Itself," Synthesis I, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 18 (1977) [winner of two Nobel Prizes for scientific research and Director of Research at the Institute for Muscle Research in Massachusetts].

"May not a future generation well ask how any Scientist, in full possession of his faculties and with adequate knowledge of information theory, could execute the feat of cognitive acrobatics necessary to sincerely believe that a (supremely complex) machine of information, storage and retrieval servicing millions of cells, diagnosing defects and then repairing them in a teleonomic Von Newman machine manner, arose in randomness - the antipole of information". (Dr A. E. Wilder-Smith, deliverer of the Huxley Memorial lecture at the Oxford Union, Oxford University, 1986). To top

"Every time I write a paper on the origin of life, I determine I will never write another one, because there is too much speculation running after too few facts." Francis Crick, [Crick received a Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA.] Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature (1981), p. 88.

"I have often thought how little I should like to have to prove organic evolution in a court of law" (Errol White, Proceedings of the Linnean Society, London 177.8 (1988) [An ichthyologist (expert on fish) in a 1988 address before a meeting of the Linnean Society in London.] To top

"In tracking the emergence of the eukaryotic cell one enters a kind of wonderland where scientific pursuit leads almost to fantasy. Cell and molecular biologists must construct cellular worlds in their own imaginations. ... Imagination, to some degree, is essential for grasping the key events in cellular history." -- B.D. Dyer and R.A. Obar, Tracing the History of Eukarytic Cells, Columbia University Press 1994, pp. 2 & 3.

"I would rather believe in fairy tales than in such wild speculation. I have said for years that speculations about the origin of life lead to no useful purpose as even the simplest living system is far too complex to be understood in terms of the extremely primitive chemistry scientists have used in their attempts to explain the unexplainable. God cannot be explained away by such naive thoughts." Sir Ernest Chain, co-holder of 1945 Nobel prize for developing penicillin. as quoted by Ronald W. Clark, The Life of Ernst Chain (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1985), pp. 147-148.

"[The instructions within the DNA of a single cell] if written out would fill a thousand 600 page books. Each cell is a world brimming with as many as two hundred trillion tiny groups of atoms called molecules. . Our 46 [human] chromosome 'threads' linked together would measure more than six feet. Yet the [cell] nucleus that contains them is less than four ten-thousandths of an inch in diameter." Rick Gore, "The Awesome Worlds within a Cell" in National Geographic, September 1976, pp. 357-358, 360. To top

"The pathetic thing is that we have scientists who are trying to prove evolution, which no scientist can ever prove." Robert Andrews Millikan (Nobel prize for Physics in 1923). Nashville Banner, August 7, 1925.

"Darwinian evolutionary theory was my field of specialization in biology. Among other things, I wrote a textbook on the subject thirty years ago. Meanwhile, however I have become an apostate from Darwinian theory and have described it as part of modernism’s origination myth. Consequently, I certainly agree that biology students at least should have the opportunity to learn about the flaws and limits of Darwin’s theory while they are learning about the theory’s strongest claims." Dr. Stanley Salthe, Professor Emeritus, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

"The theory of evolution itself is a theory universally accepted not because it can be proved by logical coherent evidence to be true but because the only alternative is special Creation, which is clearly incredible". Watson, D.M.S. “Adaptation,” Nature, August 10, 1929, Vol.124, 3119, pages: 231 - 233.

"There is little hard experimental evidence for the evolutionary hypothesis. This is true particularity in the study of the intricate mechanisms that brilliant scientific research has revealed in nature. Professor Michael Behe of Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, who wrote Darwin's black box, demolishes any possibility of Darwinian evolution at the biochemical level, and has masterfully shown there is irreducible complexity, down to minute details, in the workings of living organisms - details that will not go away with all the heat generated by Prof Dawkins and his evident atheism". Letter to the Daily Telegraph Newspaper in March 2002 from A C McIntosh, Professor of Thermodynamics and combustion theory, university of Leeds.

"Our theory of evolution has become ... one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. It is thus 'outside of empirical science." (L. Birch and P. Ehrlich, "Evolutionary History and Population Biology", Nature 218, 1987, p. 352.)

"The sciences dealing with the past, stand before the bar of common sense on a different footing. Therefore, a grotesque account of a period some thousands of years ago is taken seriously though it be built by piling special assumptions on special assumptions, ad hoc [invented for a purpose] hypothesis on ad hoc hypothesis, and tearing apart the fabric of science whenever it appears convenient. The result is a fantasia which is neither history nor science." (James Conant, quoted in "Origins Research", Vol. 5, no. 2, 1982, p. 2. [Chemist and former president, Harvard University.]

... these theories are actually tautologies and, as such, cannot make empirically testable predictions. They are not scientific theories at all." (R.H. Peters, Tautology in Evolution and Ecology", American Naturalist, 1976, Vol. 110, No. 1, p. 1.)

"In fact [subsequent to the publication of Darwin's book, Origin of Species], evolution became, in a sense, a scientific religion; almost all scientists have accepted it and many are prepared to `bend' their observations to fit with it. . To my mind, the theory does not stand up at all . . If living matter is not, then, caused by the interplay of atoms, natural forces, and radiation, how has it come into being? . . I think, however, that we must go further than this and admit that the only acceptable explanation is Creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it." H.S. Lipson, "A Physicist Looks at Evolution," Physics Bulletin, Vol. 31, p. 138 (1980) [emphasis his].

“We have all heard of The Origin of Species, although few of us have had time to read it…A casual perusal of the classic made me understand the rage of Paul Feyerabend…I agree with him that Darwinism contains ‘wicked lies’; it is not a ‘natural law’ formulated on the basis of factual evidence, but a dogma, reflecting the dominating social philosophy of the last century.” Kenneth J. Hsu, "Sedimentary Petrology and Biologic Evolution," Journal of Sedimentary Petrology 56 (September 1986): p730. To top

Darwinism And The Rise Of Degenerate Science, by Dr Paul Back - A chapter is devoted to the age of the Earth.

Grand Canyon: Monument To Catastrophe, by Dr. Steven Austin.

In six days, by fifty different scientists.

The Naked Emperor: Darwinism Exposed, by Antony Latham

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