Creationism

"There is naturally present in all men the desire to know the causes of whatever things are observed. Hence, because of wondering about things that were seen but whose causes were hidden, men first began to think philosophically; when they found the cause, they were satisfied. But the search did not stop until it reached the first cause, for "then do we think that we know perfectly, when we know the first cause." Therefore, man naturally desires, as his ultimate end, to know the first cause. But the first cause of all things is God. Therefore, the ultimate end of man is to know God."

"He created Him from dust; then He said to him, "Be," and he was."

"O mankind, fear your Lord, who created you from one soul and created from it its mate and dispersed from both of them many men and women."

"And We did certainly create man out of clay from an altered black mud. And the jinn We created before from scorching fire."

"He [Allah] created the heavens and earth in truth. High is He above what they associate with Him. He created man from a sperm-drop; then at once, he is a clear adversary. And the grazing livestock He has created for you."

"Does man not remember that We created him before, while he was nothing?"

"[Allah] Created man from a clinging substance."

"Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books."

"From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal frame began: From harmony, to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in man."

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use."

"Though to recount almighty works What words of tongue or seraph can suffice, Or heart of man suffice to comprehend?"

"Open, ye heavens, your living doors; let in The great Creator from his work return'd Magnificent, his six days' work, a world!"

"What cause Moved the Creator in his holy rest Through all eternity so late to build In chaos, and, the work begun, how soon Absolved."

"When I consider everything that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment; That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows, Whereon the stars in secret influence comment; Then the conceit of this inconstant stay Sets you most rich in youth before my sight."

"Through knowledge we behold the world's creation, How in his cradle first he fostered was; And judge of Nature's cunning operation, How things she formed of a formless mass."

"The chain that's fixed to the throne of Jove, On which the fabric of our world depends, One link dissolved, the whole creation ends."

"You own a watch the invention of the mind, Though for a single motion 'tis designed, As well as that which is with greater thought With various springs, for various motions wrought."

"Are we a piece of machinery that, like the Æolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod?"

"And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps, Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the soul of each, and God of all?"

"Nature they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote."

"This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being."

"Nature, and Nature's laws lay hid in Night. God said Let Newton be! and All was Light."

"Each moss, Each shell, each drawling insect, holds a rank Important in the plan of Him who fram'd This scale of beings; holds a rank which, lost Would break the chain, and leave behind a gap Which Nature's self would rue."

"[T]hat the Universe was formed by a fortuitous Concourse of Atoms … I will no more believe, than that the accidental Jumbling of the Letters of the Alphabet, could fall by Chance into a most ingenious and learned Treatise of Philosophy."

"Le monde m'embarrasse, et je ne puis pas songer Que cette horloge existe et n'a pas d'Horloger."

"Creation is great, and cannot be understood."

"[This saying of Alphonso about Ptolemy's astronomy, that] "it seemed a crank machine; that it was pity the Creator had not taken advice.""

"Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled."

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

"It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."

"The Religion that is afraid of science dishonors God & commits suicide. … Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting & removing a diseased religion & making way for truth."

"History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions; and, as matters now stand, it is hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the new generation, educated under the influences of the present day, will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the 'Origin of Species' with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them. Against any such a consummation let us all devoutly pray; for the scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors."

"The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious–fabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance. …The antagonism of science is not to religion, but to the heathen survivals and the bad philosophy under which religion herself is often well-nigh crushed. And, for my part, I trust that this antagonism will never cease; but that, to the end of time, true science will continue to fulfil one of her most beneficent functions, that of relieving men from the burden of false science which is imposed upon them in the name of religion."

"The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence."

"The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless."

"Wie aus Duft und Glanz gemischt Du mich schufst, dir dank ich's heut."

"No man saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets; no man heard the clink of trowel and pickaxe; it descended out of heaven from God."

"Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution as not being adequately supported by facts, seem to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none."

"One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves."

"As if some lesser God had made the world, And had not force to shape it as he would."

"It is remarkable, that almost all speakers and writers feel it to be incumbent on them, sooner or later, to prove or to acknowledge the personality of God. … In reading a work on agriculture, we have to skip the author's moral reflections, and the words "Providence" and "He" scattered along the page, to come at the profitable level of what he has to say. What he calls his religion is for the most part offensive to the nostrils. … There is more religion in men's science than there is science in their religion."

"Religions die when they are proven to be true. Science is the record of dead religions."

"His dam held that the Quiet made all things Which Setebos vexed only: ’holds not so. Who made them weak, meant weakness He might vex. Had He meant other, while His hand was in, Why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick, Or plate my scalp with bone against the snow, Or overscale my flesh ’neath joint and joint Like an orc’s armour? Ay,—so spoil His sport! He is the One now: only He doth all."

"As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes do; it was a fight about names — not about things; practically the Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman. Then he saw also that it matters little what profession, whether of religion or irreligion, a man may make, provided only he follows it out with charitable inconsistency, and without insisting on it to the bitter end. It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies."

"I am not arguing with the scientist who explains the elephant, but only with the sophist who explains it away."

"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 everything."

"We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it, and that is all."

"When a little of the water with which he moistens the clay remains over, he pours it on the ground and out of that he makes the bad and disobedient people. When he wishes to make a good man he makes him out of good clay; but when he wishes to make a bad man, he employs only bad clay for the purpose. In the beginning God fashioned a man and set him on the earth; after that he fashioned a woman. The two looked at each other and began to laugh, whereupon God sent them into the world."

"I have given my reasons for thinking that we can probably explain evolution in terms of the capacity for variation of individual organisms, and the selection exercised on them by their environment. ... The most obvious alternative to this view is to hold that evolution has throughout been guided by divine power. There are two objections to this hypothesis. Most lines of descent end in extinction, and commonly the end is reached by a number of different lines evolving in parallel. This does not suggest the work of an intelligent designer, still less of an all mighty one. But the moral objection is perhaps more serious. A very large number of originally free-living Crustacea, worms, and so on, have evolved into parasites. In doing so they have lost, to a greater or less extent, their legs, eyes, and brains, and have become in many cases the cause of considerable and prolonged pain to other animals and to man. If we are going to take an ethical point of view at all (and we must do so when discussing theological questions), we are, I think, bound to place this loss of faculties coupled with increased infliction of suffering in the same class as moral breakdown in a human being, which can often be traced to genetical causes. To put the matter in a more concrete way, Blake expressed some doubt as to whether God had made the tiger. But the tiger is in many ways an admirable animal. We have now to ask whether God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God."

"For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever. Similar tactics had been adopted during the eighteenth century and for the same reasons. … The men of the new Enlightenment which occurred in the middle years of the nineteenth century once again used meaninglessness as a weapon against the reactionaries. The Victorian passion for respectability was, however, so great that, during the period when they were formulated, neither Positivism nor Darwinism was used as a justification for sexual indulgence."