To: <darwin@atheists.net>
Subject: Hi, here are some other random quotes for your site...
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2001 20:37:49 -0800

Hi David,
        Here are some other random athiest quotes for your site, feel free to add
them, or e-mail me back to discuss:

1.
"At all events, anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube
will concede the near-impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind
person moving the cube faces at random. Now imagine 1050 blind persons each
with a scrambled Rubik cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all
simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of
arriving by random shuffling of just one of the many biopolymers on which if
e depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating
programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial
organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order."

(Hoyle, Fred [mathematician, physicist and former Professor of Astronomy,
Cambridge University], "The Big Bang in Astronomy," New Scientist, 19
November 1981, pp.521-527, p.521. Emphasis Hoyle's).
2.
"... The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on
the earth, (must) be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological
formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology
assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this,
perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged
against my theory."

Darwin, C. (1859)
The Origin of Species (Reprint of the first edition)
Avenel Books, Crown Publishers, New York, 1979, p. 292
3.
"Consequently, if my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the
lowest Silurian stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or
probably far longer than, the whole interval from the Silurian age to the
present day; and that during these vast, yet quite unknown periods of time,
the world swarmed with living creatures. To the question why we do not find
records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory
answer."

Darwin, Charles
On the Origin of Species, 1st edition
Harvard Univ. Press, facsimile reprint, 1964, p. 307

Note: In Darwin's time, the "Silurian" was the name given the oldest known
fossil-bearing strata. "Cambrian" does not occur as an index entry in this
edition of the Origin.
4.
"[T]he absence of fossil evidence for intermediate stages between major
transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our
imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a
persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."

Gould, S.J., 1982
"Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?"
Evolution Now: A Century After Darwin
Maynard Smith, J. (editor)
W. H. Freeman and Co. in association with Nature, p. 140
5.
"The scientist's religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement
at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such
superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting
of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection".

Professor Albert Einstein from 'The World as I see it."
Watts & Co. Page 9.

Sincerely,
        M***

P.S.  Let's correspond!  :-)

 

To: <m***@********>
From: Darwin Bedford <Darwin@atheists.net>
Subject: Re: Hi, here are some other random quotes for your site...

Sorry M***, I don't have the time to research a response for you.  I suggest that you do a Google search honestly looking for your opponents' views.

D. Bedford
www.atheists.net