Michael Shermer Quotes

It is unconstitutional to teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.

You know, our fundamentalist friends dislike the teaching of evolution in schools because of the effect they feel it has on our view of our own special importance, while liberals insist that scientific and spiritual matters can be kept in separate compartments. On this point, I tend to agree with the fundamentalists, though I come to opposite conclusions about teaching evolution because I am convinced it's true.

It was an effort to include intelligent design and treat it as science, disparaging evolution along the way. That will not stand.

No wonder the creationists don't believe the darwinian account.

It's always a tough call deciding whether, as a scientist, you should argue publicly with the creationists. It's a dilemma that I encounter frequently in another subject area: Does it make sense to bandy words with someone from the UFO community?

Atheistic evolution isn't an intelligent belief, as atheists would have the black community believe.

I am a believer in the evolutionary process, and yet I have sympathy for the friends of mine who are creationists. I don't find the positions incompatible.

Deep down, creationists realize they will never win factual arguments with science. This is why they have construed their own science-like universe, known as Intelligent Design, and eagerly jump on every tidbit of information that seems to go their way.

Intelligent design itself does not have any content.

To prevent discussion of any other explanations of human origins is hardly what I would expect from open-minded educators.

You have to know evolution to understand the natural world. And that cannot be a threat to people of faith. There's a serious problem if you are forced by your faith to reject the most well-supported theory in all of science.

Undirected natural processes like the Darwinian mechanism are incapable of generating the specified complexity that exists in biological organisms … the natural sciences need to leave room for design.

We find that intelligent design fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that intelligent design is a science … intelligent design violates the centuries old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; the argument of irreducible complexity, central to intelligent design, employees the same flawed and a logically contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the nineteen eighties; intelligent design’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community …

Intelligent design is nothing less than the progeny of creationism.

This was not a real issue. It was invented to promote the ideology [creationism] of the people on the school. This ideology has no place in modern education.

Pope Francis is not the first religious leader who has endorsed evolution and the Big Bang, but he is certainly one of the most influential.

Evolution is the key to avoiding the whole issue of God. When you challenge evolution, you're basically challenging someone on a spiritual level.

Creationism, perhaps the most pernicious of the intellectual perversions now afflicting the American public.

Theology made no provision for evolution.

The fundamentalists deny that evolution has taken place; they deny that the earth and the universe as a whole are more than a few thousand years old, and so on. There is ample scientific evidence that the fundamentalists are wrong in these matters, and that their notions of cosmogony have about as much basis in fact as the Tooth Fairy has.

There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design.

Darwinian evolution is unscientific, unobservable, unbelievable, but understandable in a world that hates God.

The real question is, Did God use evolution as His plan? If it could be shown that man, instead of being made in the image of God, is a development of beasts we would have to accept it, regardless of its effort, for truth is truth and must prevail. But when there is no proof we have a right to consider the effect of the acceptance of an unsupported hypothesis.

Creationists reject Darwin's theory of evolution on the grounds that it is "just a theory". This is a valid criticism: evolution is indeed merely "a theory", albeit one with ten billion times more credence than the theory of creationism - although, to be fair, the theory of creationism is more than just a theory. It's also a fairy story. And children love fairy stories, which is presumably why so many creationists are keen to have their whimsical gibberish taught in schools.

Is evolution just another name for God?