EVOLUTION
Humans arose, rather, as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked
events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternate
pathway that would not have led to consciousness.
Dr. Stephen Jay Gould, Scientific American, October 1994, p. 86.
The French Mathematician, Lecompte de Nouy, examined the laws of probability for a
single molecule of high dissymmetry to be formed by the action of chance. De Nouy found
that, on an average, the time needed to form one such molecule of our terrestrial globe
would be about 10 to the 253 power--billions of years. "But," continued de Nouy
ironically, "let us admit that no matter how small the chance it could happen, one
molecule could be created by such astronomical odds of chance. However, one molecule is of
no use. Hundreds of millions of identical ones are necessary. Thus we either admit the
miracle or doubt the absolute truth of science."
Quoted in; "Is Science Moving
Toward Belief in God?" Paul A. Fisher, The Wanderer, (Nov 7, 1985), cited in
Kingdoms
In Conflict, C. Colson, p. 66.
It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly
unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more
thinkable that nothing should turn itself into anything.
G.K. Chesterton in The Quotable
Chesterton.
Near the end of his life, Jean-Paul Sartre told Pierre Victor: "I do not feel that
I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected,
prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea
of a creating hand refers to God.
Protested fellow philosopher and long-time companion
Simone de Beauvoir: "How should one explain the senile act of a turncoat?"
HIS Magazine, April, 1983.
Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would the fact not strongly
suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures?
If you are really a product of a material universe, how is it that you don't feel at home
there?
Bruce Shelly, Christian Theology in Plain Language, p. 29.
I cannot make peace with the randomness doctrine; I cannot abide the notion of
purposelessness and blind chance in nature. And yet I do not know what to put in its place
for the quieting of my mind. It is absurd to say that a place like this is absurd, when it
contains, in front of our eyes, so many billions of different forms of life, each one in
its way absolutely perfect, all linked together to form what would surely seem to an
outsider a huge, spherical organism. We talk--some of us, anyway---about the absurdity of
the human situation, but we do this because we do not know how we fit in, or what we are
for. The stories we used to make up to explain ourselves do not make sense anymore, and we
have run out of new stories, for the moment.
Lewis Thomas in Harvard Magazine,
quoted in June, 1981.
Poems
Three monkeys sat in a coconut tree
Discussing the things that are said to be--
Said one to another: "Now listen you two
There's a certain rumor, but it can't be true'
That man descended from our noble race-
Why, the very idea; it's a disgrace.
No monkey ever deserted his wife,
Starved her babies and ruined her life.
Nor did ever a mother-monkey
Leave her babies with others to bunk,
Or pass them on from one to another
'Till they scarcely knew who was their mother.
And another thing you'll never see
A monkey building a nest around a coconut tree,
And let the coconuts go to waste,
Forbidding all other monkeys to have a taste.
Why, if I build a fence around a coconut tree,
Starvation would cause me to distribute to you.
Here's another thing that a monkey won't do:
Go out at night and get on a stew;
Or use a gun, a club, or a knife
To take another monkey's life.
Yes, Man descended, the ornery cuss!
But Brother, he didn't descend from us."
Resource, July/August, 1990.
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