Fire and Knowledge

The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he’s pretty much on his own.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 287

A reasonable person, eager to accept intelligent design as an explanation for [elephants], must therefore believe that the designer started more than 50 million years ago with a small organism quite unlike the Indian elephant. Then, over time, he crafted scores of new species, his designs gradually drifting closer and closer to the modern elephant. In the last few million years, he constructed in rapid succession nearly a dozen semifinal drafts until Elpehas maximus finally came off the drawing table.

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 97

In order to defend God against the challenge they see from evolution, [creationists] 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.

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 80

Very seldom have I (or most biologists) obtained data on biological systems that even begins to approach the consistency and precision of this [dating] method. The rubidium-strontium method gives self-calibrating and self-checking results. If geological processes have removed or added either rubidium or strontium, the method will show it at once, because the points will fail to lie on a straight line. If a rock has been homogenized by melting and recrystallization, the isochron line will be rest to zero, and the measured age will be an underestimate reflecting the time of melting. However, no natural process exists that could produce over-estimates of age that would pass the rigorous test of isochron analysis.

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 76

When the priests themselves ceased to believe in their Deity and began to believe in astronomy, they changed their name and their dress, and called themselves doctors and men of science. They set up a new religion in which there was no Deity, but only wonders and miracles, with scientific instruments and apparatus as the wonder workers.

Instead of worshipping the greatness and wisdom of the Deity, men gaped foolishly at the million billion miles of space and worshipped the astronomer as infallible and omniscient. They built temples of his telescopes.

Then they looked into their own bodies with microscopes, and found there, not the soul they had formerly believed in, but millions of micro-organisms; so they gaped as foolishly as at the millions of miles, and built microscope temples in which horrible sacrifices were offered. They even gave their own bodies to be sacrificed by the microscope man, who was worshipped, like the astronomer, as infallible and omniscient.

Thus our discoveries, instead of increasing our wisdom, only destroyed the little childish wisdom we had.

–The Elderly Gentleman in Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (Oxford University Press: Revised edition, 1947), p. 147

Today about a billion billion insects are alive at any given time around the world. At nearest order of magnitude, this amounts to a trillion kilograms of living matter, somewhat more than the weight of humanity. Their species, most of which lack a scientific name, number into the millions. The human race is a newcomer dwelling among the six-legged masses, less than two million years old, with a tenuous grip on the planet. Insects can thrive without us, but we and most other land organisms would perish without them.

–Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1992, Harvard University Press), p. 210-211

Once Intelligent Design is shorn of its distracting attacks on evolution, there’s very little real science left to consider. How does Intelligent Design account for all the evidence in favor of evolution, from the fossil record to mutation rates to the similarities and differences between species? At what exact point did the designer intervene in the evolution of a horse, or bird flight, or the Cambrian explosion? And what did the designer do? How can we test these claims? What predictions has Intelligent Design made that have resulted in important new discoveries? If you look for answers to these questions, you end up only with contradictions, untestable claims, or most often, silence.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 330

Considering that the human animal did not taste [high-fructose corn syrup] until 1980, for [it] to have become the leading source of sweetness in our diet stands as a notable achievement on the part of the corn-refining industry, not to mention this remarkable plant.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 103