Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution Quotes

“The theology advanced by creationism is not any better than its science.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“Consider how the fundamentalist theological orientation is always in the direction of control. This controversy shows that they want to control not just human beings but God, too. They want to say how and what God can or cannot create.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“The attempt to make Genesis 1 an alternative theory to evolutionary theory is flawed in numerous ways, but perhaps the deepest flaw is the lack of faith that accompanies it, the refusal to admit God as Creator of the actual universe that exists.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“What happens to Christ if Adam and Eve are not historical? This is the question that drives fundamentalist anxiety.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“Pope Pius XII’s encyclical, Humani Generis, (The Origin of Humanity), shows the kind of concerns about the theory almost a century after Darwin.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“the church’s approach to scripture underwent a fundamental transformation with the 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu. The document was issued in the fiftieth anniversary year of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Providentissimus Deus. In that letter Leo XIII had emphasized the need for critical methods in the study of the scriptures. The letter is described as “the supreme guide in biblical studies.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“The question of the intelligibility of the universe is a theological one: Why an intelligible world? Why a universe whose structures correspond to the human capacity to understand? The physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne gives a theological answer to the question: “Science is possible, and mathematics so remarkably effective, because the world is a creation and we creatures are made in the image of the Creator. Fundamental physics reveals a universe shot through with signs of mind, and it is an attractive understanding that it is indeed the Mind of God that lies behind the wonderful cosmic order.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“Faith is not absent from scientific inquiry in any case. Belief is an intrinsic dimension of scientists’ inquiry. To engage in any investigation of physical reality requires that scientists believe that a real world exists outside of their own minds.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“Kenneth Miller, a scientist and believer, argues that the creationists demonstrate a lack of faith in God’s omnipotence because they assume that God does not have the power to create a world in which life could evolve by natural laws and must intervene to accomplish certain things.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“Granted, some scientists are atheists, it is manifestly untrue that all scientists are atheists or that engaging in evolutionary biology heads one down an atheist path.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“The imperfection and dysfunction we find in the world present problems for one’s conception of divine power, wisdom, or goodness. What kind of God thinks up all these horrific mating rituals we find in spiders? But if the world we discover is a product of natural selection, our conception of God remains without threat.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“Six centuries before the Common Era, the philosopher Anaximander (c. 610–545 B.C.E.) speculated that the world began as a watery soup with human beings as fish-like creatures slowly developing the necessary traits to become land-dwellers.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“To say that God “created the universe” invites images of God crafting things. But for Thomas it means, rather, that all things stand in a relationship of absolute dependence to a creator. This relation is not “out there” but in creatures. In other terms, existence is contingent. Created beings have being, while God is being. God gives existence to what was not. That a completely contingent universe exists is therefore due to God. It exists, too, with the full integrity of its own systems, laws, and causality. Things are the way they are because God has caused the whole universe to be governed by the laws intrinsic to it.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“theology introduces a systematic realm of meaning in which distinctions and definitions capture an understanding of the subject “in itself” rather than in the common-sense mode of understanding it merely “in relation to me.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“All knowledge is from God. In knowing what is, human beings come to know what God already knows.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“Augustine’s “divine illumination epistemology” brings God into relation with science, not as an alternative explanation to what scientists propose about the world but at the root of their understanding of the world.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“What is clear from an overview of comments of Christian theologians from the first centuries of the church is that they did not defend a literal interpretation of Genesis 1, nor did they use the text of Genesis 1 to counter other views. They assume the perspective of Genesis 1—the unity and transcendence of God, the goodness of creation—but they were not bound by the text of Genesis 1 in any way, certainly not in any literalist way.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“Once the doctrine of original sin was in place, all other theological categories revolved around it. Original sin became the reason for the Incarnation itself. The catechetical question and response are familiar: “Why did Christ come? To save us from original sin.” This was not the only way the Incarnation and redemption were understood or could be understood, but this became the dominant interpretation. Fundamentalists today understand Christ exclusively in this way.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“In ordinary language, myth means a commonly held but mistaken belief. But literary critics use myth to denote literary expressions—either poetic or narrative—that deal symbolically with fundamental questions.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“But what creationists are doing when they threaten the integrity of science education carries serious consequences. Science is a condition for the possibility of the human good. Such a threat should be shown for what it is and resisted.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“Unless one reads Genesis 1 as an alternative to evolutionary theory, evolutionary theory is not a threat to faith but an unparalleled insight into the sheer magnificence of the universe.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution

“When creation and evolution are thought to be incompatible, three problematic presumptions are often at work: 1. by creation is meant the biblical story of creation in Genesis 1, understood as a historical event, 2. Genesis 1 and evolutionary theory each describes the origin of living species, and 3. we must choose between them. If these presumptions are indeed at work, then we have engaged this controversy in terms shaped by fundamentalists, the most conservative of Christian traditions.”
― Tatha Wiley, Creationism and the Conflict over Evolution