Evolution And God Quotes & Sayings

Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that's so big we forget it's there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to a fish. We are cells in the body of a three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system. — Grant Morrison

Maybe if I had to boil it down to one easy sentence, it would be this: I believe in evolution, and I believe in God. I just haven't worked out the details yet. — Robin Brande

Unless one is a religious fundamentalist and believes that man was created in the image and likeness of God, it is foolish to believe that human beings are exempt from biological classification and the laws of evolution that apply to all other life forms. — J. Philippe Rushton

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. — Stephen Jay Gould

'All the gods are one god and all the goddesses are one goddess, and there is one initiator.' The one initiator is one's own high self, with which the personality becomes more and more integrated as the path of spiritual evolution is followed. — Doreen Valiente

In spite of all these disquieting triumphs in the field of natural science, it's astonishing how little man has learned about himself, and how much there is to learn. How little we know about this brain which made social evolution possible, and of the mind. How little we know of the nature and spirit of man and God. We stand now before this inner frontier of ignorance. If we could pass it, we might well discover the meaning of life and understand man's destiny. — Wilder Penfield

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. — William Jennings Bryan

The advances of science and technology will bring us to the greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham: how much to retrofit the human genotype. Shall it be a lot, a little bit, or none at all? The choice will be forced on us because our species has begun to cross what is the most important yet still least examined threshold in the technoscientific era. We are about to abandon natural selection, the process that created us, in order to direct our own evolution by volitional selection - the process of redesigning our biology and human nature as we wish them to be. — Edward O. Wilson

What you are seeking in your retreat, I see clearly in every road and alleyway. — Idries Shah

What religion a man holds, to what race he belongs, these things are not important; the really important thing is this knowledge: the knowledge of God's plan for men. For God has a plan, and that plan is evolution. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives - maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of anything and so on. That's what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions. — Kurt Vonnegut

First understand infinity then you will understand God and how evolution is intelligent design. — E. Lee Spence

Always be respectful and open-minded when listening to another man's beliefs. What you reject today could be your mantra tomorrow. Man's evolution is all about transformations. An unexpected experience you have one day can change you forever. — Suzy Kassem

I say the Intelligent Design-evolution debate misses the point. It trivializes God and it trivializes science. The universe is like the hand of God. The world is God's body. — Michael Dowd

Christianity will not be content to be an evolution within the total category of human nature; an engagement such as that is too little to offer to a god. Neither does it even want to be the paradox for the believer, and then surreptitiously, little by little, provide him with understanding, because the martyrdom of faith (to crucify one's understanding) is not a martyrdom of the moment, but the martyrdom of continuance. — Soren Kierkegaard

The tree in the field is to be treated with respect. It is not to be romanticized as the old lady romanticizes her cat (that is, she reads human reactions into it) ... But while we should not romanticize the tree, we must realize that God made it and it deserves respect because he made it as a tree. Christians who do not believe in the complete evolutionary scale have reason to respect nature as the total evolutionist never can, because we believe that God made these things specifically in their own areas. So if we are going to argue against evolutionists intellectually, we should show the results of our beliefs in our attitudes. The Christian is a man who has a reason for dealing with each created thing on a high level of respect. — Francis A. Schaeffer

If you pay attention to those aspects of God that demonstrate love, truth, beauty, intelligence, order, and spiritual evolution, those aspects will begin to expand in your life. Bit by bit, like a mosaic, disparate fragments of grace will merge to form a complete picture. Eventually this picture will replace the ore threatening one you have carried around inside you since infancy. — Deepak Chopra

People have a hard time accepting free-market economics for the same reason they have a hard time accepting evolution: it is counterintuitive. Life looks intelligently designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that there must be an intelligent designer
a God. Similarly, the economy looks designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that we need a designer
a government. In fact, emergence and complexity theory explains how the principles of self-organization and emergence cause complex systems to arise from simple systems without a top-down designer. — Michael Shermer

God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are 'equal'? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. 'Created equal' should therefore be translated into 'evolved differently'. — Yuval Noah Harari

I believe in rendering to science the things that belong to science. I have no problem with evolution or discussions of the age of the Earth, for I don't believe that we come anywhere near comprehending the mind of God or the workings of the universe. Science can explain a lot, but it cannot give us faith, and I think we need both. — Brandon Sanderson

The belief that the animals exist because God created them - and that he created them so we can better meet our needs - is contrary to our scientific understanding of evolution and, of course, to the fossil record, which shows the existence of non-human primates and other animals millions of years before there were any human beings at all. — Peter Singer

All life is evolving, for evolution is God's law; and man grows slowly and steadily along with the rest. — Charles Webster Leadbeater

In the beginning, God created human beings, which is to say God put the ingredients together, embedded the instructions for building on the template, and put it all into four separate eggs marked 'Some Assembly Required. — Karen Lord

I believe in God because only an idiot can look at the complex balance of nature and believe that has not been designed. Believe it or not, but some people still believe that a watch can make itself out of sand if you just give it enough time. That's what they call evolution. And you wonder why I am cynical. From my point of view you have to be a fool not to be cynical. — Ted Dekker

Evolution is an unproven theory. If what its fundamentalist supporters believe is true, fishes decided to grow lungs and legs and walk up the beach. The idea is so comically daft that only one thing explains its survival-that lonely, frightened people wanted to expel God from the Universe because they found the idea that He exists profoundly uncomfortable. — Peter Hitchens

Forget the buildings and the monuments. Let the softness of dark come in, all those light-years between stars and planets. Cities were the works of men but the earth before and after those cities, outside and beneath and around them, was the dream of a sleeping leviathan--it was god sleeping there and dreaming, the same god that was time and transfiguration. From whatever dreamed the dream at the source, atom or energy, flowed all the miracles of evolution--tiger, tiger burning bright, the massive whales in the deep, luminescent specters in their mystery. The pearls that were their eyes, their tongues that were wet leaves, their bodies that were the bodies of the fantastic.

Spectacular bestiaries of heaven, the limbs and tails of the gentle and the fearsome, silent or raging at will . . . they could never be known in every detail and they never should be. — Lydia Millet

Whatever variety evolution brings forth ... Every new dimension of world-response ... means another modality for God's trying out his hidden essence and discovering himself through the surprises of world-adventure ... the heightening pitch and passion of life that go with the twin rise of perception and motility in animals. The ever more sharpened keenness of appetite and fear, pleasure and pain, triumph and anguish, love and even cruelty - their very edge is the deity's gain. Their countless, yet never blunted incidence - hence the necessity of death and new birth - supplies the tempered essence from which the Godhead reconstitutes itself. All this, evolution provides in the mere lavishness of its play and sternness of its spur. Its creatures, by merely fulfilling themselves in pursuit of their lives, vindicate the divine venture. Even their suffering deepens the fullness of the symphony. Thus, this side of good and evil, God cannot lose in the great evolutionary game. — Hans Jonas

Evolution, as a mechanism, can be and must be true. But that says nothing about the nature of its author. For those who believe in God, there are reasons now to be more in awe, not less. — Francis Collins

The wolf eats the lamb; the strong eats the weak. This is not God's Order, because it lacks justice, ethics and goodness. This chaotic structure belongs to the evolution! Evolution is primitive and it lacks high intelligence; it moves ahead by crawling and it is faulty! He who calls this system as God's Order openly insults God! We must know that God is not in this universe; He is somewhere else, somewhere where there is no evolution, where there is justice, ethics and goodness! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

But the problem becomes even worse. For, regardless of immortality, if there is no God, then there is no objective standard of right and wrong. All we're confronted with is, in Sartre's words, "the bare, valueless fact of existence." Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or the by-products of biological evolution and social conditioning. — William Lane Craig

Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution? — Richard Dawkins

(We) consist of everything the world consists of, each of us, and just as our body contains the genealogical table of evolution as far back as the fish and even much further, so we bear everything in our soul that once was alive in the soul of men. Every god and devil that ever existed, be it among the Greeks, Chinese, or Zulus, are within us, exist as latent possibilities, as wishes, as alternatives. If the human race were to vanish from the face of the earth save for one halfway talented child that had received no education, this child would rediscover the entire course of evolution, it would be capable of producing everything once more, gods and demons, paradises, commandments, the Old and New Testament. — Hermann Hesse

So, if someone like Richard Dawkins indignantly protests that his passion about these sorts of things -- the passion that drives the "God Delusion" -- should not be taken as a religious passion, I am happy to accept that. I do nevertheless think that often Dawkins and company show the sociological characteristics of the religious. This comes across particularly in what Freud calls the narcissism of small differences, the hatred of those who are close to them but not quite close enough. Just as evangelicals can differ bitterly over the true meaning of the host, so the New Atheists loathe people like me who (like them) have no religious belief but who think that science as such does not refute religion.
[Is Darwinism a Religion? - Michael Ruse] — Michael Ruse

I'll tell you what I think. I think sages are the growing tip of the secret impulse of evolution. I think they are the leading edge of the self-transcending drive that always goes beyond what went before. I think they embody the very drive of the Kosmos toward greater depth and expanding consciousness. I think they are riding the edge of a light beam toward a rendezvous with God. — Ken Wilber

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. — Galileo Galilei

God wants to be praised for nourishing and cherishing, for God cherishes all creatures. God is not only the creator, but is also the sustainer and nourisher. — Martin Luther

If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God's rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory, no special rights, no intrinsic and inalienable merit. If you insist on teaching your children false-hoods - that the Earth is flat, that "Man" is not a product of evolution by natural selection - then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity. Our future well-being - the well-being of all of us on the planet - depends on the education of our descendants. — Daniel C. Dennett

God will bring people and events into our lives, and whatever we may think about them, they are designed for the evolution of His life in us. — Thomas Keating

If only you knew who you really were you would be fearless and love yourself with a grand passion! You are a unique shard of God, the Universe, the whole or whatever label you would like to call it. No one can take your place and without you endless synchronicity and evolution would not happen. You are so powerful that just by walking down the street you can change someone's life forever. — Michele Knight

Since the white man says he came from the evolution of animals, well, maybe the black man didn't. The white man has made so many errors in the handling of people that maybe he did come from a gorilla or a fish and crawl up on the sand and then into the trees. Of course, evolution doesn't take God into consideration. I don't think people learned to do all the things they do through evolution. — Charles Mingus

Some call it evolution, And others call it God. — Charles Darwin

Everywhere on Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components of the Ultra-human. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Ray Comfort does it again! With simplicity and keen insight on the streets, he pulls back the curtain of Evolution and reveals that the Great Wizard of Darwinism is just an insecure little man with a dream of becoming a god. I highly recommend this helpful, faith-building, and inspiring video for families, teachers, and pastors! — Kirk Cameron

Given its diverse meanings and lack of specificity, the word "scientism" should be dropped. But if it's to be kept, I suggest we level the playing field by introducing the term religionism, which I'll define as "the tendency of religion to overstep its boundaries by making unwarranted statements about the universe, or by demanding unearned authority." Religionism would include clerics claiming to be moral authorities, arguments that scientific phenomena give evidence for God, and unsupported statements about the nature of a god and how he interacts with the world. And here we find no lack of examples, including believers who blame natural disasters on homosexuality, tell us that God doesn't want us to use condoms, argue that the acceptance of evolution by scientists is a conspiracy, and insist that human morality and the universe's "fine-tuning" are evidence for God. — Jerry A. Coyne

I had met a girl by chance that I might just as well not have met. A girl with red hair supposedly inherited from her grandfather, a plump girl with fair skin, broad lips, one eye light green and the other blue-violet, a girl who sometimes went wall-eyed and weighed around fifty-eight kilograms. Fifty-eight kilograms of water and lime, phosphorus, iron, as well as traces of other chemicals. Fifty-eight kilograms of water and a few pinches of the elements from her fellow countryman Mendeleev's table. Ten buckets of water brought to life by the great force of evolution or by our provincial God. — Tadeusz Konwicki

It is also worth noting that one can obtain a Ph.D. in any branch of science for no other purpose than to make cynical use of scientific language in an effort to rationalize the glaring inadequacies of tbe Bible. A handful of Christians appear to have done this; some have even obtained their degrees from reputable universities. No doubt, others will follow in their footsteps. While such people are technically "scientists," they are not behaving like scientists. They simply are not engaged in an honest inquiry into the nature of the universe. And their proclamations about God and the failures of Darwinism do not in the least signify that there is a legitimate scientific controversy about evolution. — Sam Harris

There was a time when skepticism was an act of rebellion. Since to a degree I both believe in evolution and have faith, I can only conclude that, as prophesied, to have faith will someday be an act of rebellion. — Criss Jami

Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm's "Being greater than which nothing can be conceived," it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred. — Daniel C. Dennett

Evolution, or God depending on your preference, has left us with brains that latch on to the first explanation that seems to fit the facts and our own mind-sets and biases when we face a puzzle. Even smart analysts develop shallow, comfortable mental ruts. To get them out, you have to make them uncomfortable, make them consider new ideas, including some that they might not like. — Mark E. Henshaw

The answer to what we're looking for, fixing the world with love, has to be traced back to something, and we can only trace it back to the God who is love. If we dive into the rest of Genesis and say, "What is this 'day' nonsense? As modern people, we can't believe that," then we have already missed the point. God has revealed to us through Moses the foundations of our desire for love and we want to talk about matter? When we lie in bed at night, do we miss matter or do we miss love? We miss love. — Zach Weihrauch

[Evolution] doesn't mean God-guided, gradual creation. It means unguided, purposeless change. The Darwinian theory doesn't say that God created slowly. It says that naturalistic evolution is the creator, and so God had nothing to do with it. — Philip Johnson

But the older priestesses had explained to her, as they gathered in the courtyard, that the Moon God was effacing the brightness of the Goddess, and she ran out with them joyously to join in the shrieks of the women to frighten him away. Later it had been explained to her how the sun and moon moved, and why, now and again, one of them crossed the face of the other; that it was in the way of nature, and the common people's beliefs about the face of the Gods were symbols which these people, at the current state of their evolution, needed to visualize the great truths. Some day all men and women would know the inner truths, but now they needed them not. — Marion Zimmer Bradley

In the theory of evolution there is no talk of God and no Bibles are used. They're not looking for higher powers, extraterrestrials, or anything else that could be found in the science fiction section, because they are not dealing with fiction. — Henry Rollins

The surname of an atheist is compound unfortunate plus being, therefore unfortunate-beings, making all atheists unfortunate beings because human beings are created by God and not products of big bang atoms undergoing evolution. — S. E. Entsua-Mensah

Wilberforce did not believe in either evolution or extinction.
Owen believed in extinction but not evolution.
Lamarck believed in evolution but not extinction.
Darwin believed in evolution and extinction.
All four of them believed in God. — Sara Maitland

I'm an Atheist. I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me. I don't believe in life after death, channeled chat rooms with the dead, reincarnation, telekinesis or any miracles but the miracle of life and consciousness, which again strike me as miracles in nearly obscene abundance. I believe that the universe abides by the laws of physics, some of which are known, others of which will surely be discovered, but even if they aren't, that will simply be a result, as my colleague George Johnson put it, of our brains having evolved for life on this one little planet and thus being inevitably limited. I'm convinced that the world as we see it was shaped by the again genuinely miraculous, let's even say transcendent, hand of evolution through natural selection. — Natalie Angier

A sculpture of the magnificent shape of God. Oh, admittedly it was a shallow rendering of That Which Cannot Be Named; but art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean. — Laird Barron

The Christians who engaged in infamous persecutions and shameful inquisitions were not evil men but misguided men. The churchmen who felt they had an edict from God to withstand the progress of science, whether in the form of a Copernican revolution or a Darwinian theory of natural selection, were not mischievous men but misinformed men. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We evolved haphazardly within a random universe; no purpose underpins us, no God watches over us, and no assured glorious future awaits us. We are saddled with a dualistic consciousness that weighs us down and plays tricks on us. We have built and seem unable to dismantle a dehumanizing and destructive civilization and mindset that perpetuates deceit and greed. We can make ourselves as comfortable as possible, as doctors tell their terminally ill patients, but we are sadly incurable. — Colin Feltham

Only God was able to create a free creature, and freedom could only arise by the act of creation. Freedom is not the result or product of evolution. Freedom and product are disparate ideas. God does not produce or construct. He creates. We used to say the same for artists, for the artist who constructs does not create a personality but rather a poster of man. A personality cannot be constructed. Maybe sooner or later, during this century or after a million years of continued civilization, man will succeed in constructing an imitation of himself, a kind of robot or monster, something similar to its constructor. This human-looking monster may look very much like man, but one thing is certain: it will never have freedom. Without a divine touch, the result of evolution would not have been man, but rather a developed animal, a super-animal, a creature with a human body and intelligence but without a heart and personality. — Alija Izetbegovic

Adam was created, as it were, intoxicated with rejoicing toward God and was delighted also with all the other creatures. — Martin Luther

We need to attack the false foundation of autonomous human reasoning that leads to evolution and millions of years, and proclaim that God's revealed Word is authoritative and its history of the world is foundational to Christian morality and the gospel of Jesus Christ. — Ken Ham

When man comes to the realization that he is not the "favorite" of God; that he was not specially created, that the universe was not made for his benefit, and that he is subject to the same laws of nature as all other forms of life, then, and not until then, will he understand that he must rely upon himself, and himself alone, for whatever benefits he is to enjoy; and devote his time and energies to helping himself and his fellow men to meet the exigencies of life and to set about to solve the difficult and intricate problems of living.
The recognition of a problem is the first step to its solution - We are not "fallen" angels, nor were we "created" perfect.
On the contrary, we are the product of millions of years of an unpurposed evolution. We are the descendants and inheritors of all the defects of our primitive ancestry - the evolution of the myriad forms of life from the infinitesimal to the mammoth - from the worm to the dinosaur. — Joseph Lewis

Without denying that adaptation may be one of God's methods of operation, it may be definitely said, that an intelligent Master of the universe, in which we believe, has the power to prepare an earth to fit the needs of man; or fit man to meet the conditions of earth. If He were not able to do so, He would be inferior to His creatures who build houses for human comfort, and equip them with heating, freezing, and many other devices. The argument for adaptation, standing alone, requires chance as a creative force. That we do not and cannot believe. — John Andreas Widtsoe

I prefer a God who once and for all impressed his will upon creation, to one who continually busied about modifying what he had already done. — William Temple

People who believe in God think God has put human beings on earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a zoo, like we put chimpanzees and gorillas into a zoo. Or human beings will all catch a disease and die out or they will make too much pollution and kill themselves, and then there will only be insects in the world and they will be the best animal. — Mark Haddon

Satan is behind the theory of evolution. Satan hates God and us. Satan is the father of all lies. So he wants nothing more than to make every human being alive believe lies about God, ourselves and how and why we exist. — Lisa Bedrick

We need a quickening of faith; faith in the power of the God of Pentecost to convict and convert three thousand in a day. Faith, not in a process of culture by which we hope to train children into a state of salvation, but faith in the mighty God who can quicken a dead soul into life in a moment; faith in moral and spiritual revolution rather than evolution. — A.C. Dixon

The core of the evolution controversy can thus be phrased in simple terms: Did mind create matter? Or did matter give rise to mind? According to a theistic worldview, mind is primary. It is the fundamental creative force in the universe (whether God created the world quickly by fiat or slowly by a gradual process). Darwin reversed things. According to his theory, matter is the primary creative force, and mind emerged only very late in evolutionary history.10 — Nancy Pearcey

Today we know not only that there is a terrible amount of disorder in the heavens - great catastrophes or conflagrations occur frequently - but evolution gives us a perfectly natural explanation of such order as there is. No distinguished astronomer now traces "the finger of God" in the heavens; and astronomers ought to know best. — Joseph McCabe

I think spirituality, even if there's no God, even if there's nothing - I consider myself relatively spiritual. I believe in a God. I don't know what it's like, but I do believe in it. It's the only thing that makes any sense. Maybe I'm just looking for order in the chaos. Though, I do believe in Evolution and I do believe in science. — Gerard Way

We humans are the gods of this planet. And we also have created Superior Gods than us, to have a sense of security. — Abhijit Naskar

I have the best of both worlds. I have all the accolades that come with something like that video, but I don't have people stopping me on the street and being like, "Oh, my God, dance for me." I have probably only been recognized three or four times flat out - someone saying, "Are you the Evolution of Dance guy?" — Judson Laipply

If we maintain the open-mindedness of children, we challenge fixed ideas and established structures, including our own. We listen to people in other denominations and religions. We don't find demons in those with whom we disagree. We don't cozy up to people who mouth our jargon. If we are open, we rarely resort to either-or: either creation or evolution, liberty or law, sacred or secular, Beethoven or Madonna. We focus on both-and, fully aware that God's truth cannot be imprisoned in a small definition. — Brennan Manning

We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. — Pope Benedict XVI

It is interesting that it is not the getting of any sort of knowledge that God has forbidden, but, specifically, the knowledge of the difference between good and evil-that is, abstract and moral judgments, which, if they reside anywhere, reside in the neocortex. — Carl Sagan

Like Nadia, I wrestled with the evangelical tradition in which I was raised, often ungracefully. At times I've tried to wring the waters of my first baptism out of my clothes, shake them out of my hair, and ask for a do-over in some other community where they ordain women, vote for Democrats, and believe in evolution. But Jesus has this odd habit of allowing ordinary, screwed-up people to introduce him, and so it was ordinary, screwed-up people who first told me I was a beloved child of God, who first called me a Christian. I don't know where my story of faith will take me, but it will always begin here. That much can never change. — Rachel Held Evans

Quantum mechanics says that it is completely correct to say that the universe's
evolution is determined not by how it started in the Big Bang, but by the final
state of the universe. Every stage of universal history, including every stage of logical and human history, is determined by the ultimate goal of the universe. And
if I am correct that the universal final state is indeed God, then every stage of universal
history, in particular every mutation that has ever occurred, or ever will occur
in any living being, is determined by the action of God. — Frank J. Tipler

By understanding evolution as the expression of universal intelligence, now becoming conscious of itself within us, and as us, we overcome the dichotomy between current evolutionists who see no design in evolution, and creationists who often propose and anthropomorphic God as creator. — Barbara Marx Hubbard

I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. — Richard Dawkins

As to the Divine Design, is it not an instance of incomprehensibly and infinitely marvellous Wisdom and Design to have given certain laws to matter millions of ages ago, which have surely and precisely worked out, in the long course of those ages, those effects which He from the first proposed. Mr. Darwin's theory need not then to be atheistical, be it true or not; it may simply be suggesting a larger idea of Divine Prescience and Skill. Perhaps your friend has got a surer clue to guide him than I have, who have never studied the question, and I do not [see] that 'the accidental evolution of organic beings' is inconsistent with divine design - It is accidental to us, not to God. — John Henry Newman

if you are suffering without a belief in God, then there is not a lot of hope that your pain has any greater purpose in the grand scheme of the universe. Suffering is just a part of naturalistic evolution weeding you out of existence for something stronger and younger to take your place on the food chain. — Jon Morrison

In modern neurotheology we examine the physical bases to spiritual, religious and mystical experiences and beliefs, that implicitly appear to reduce this rich phenomenology to only neuronal functions. So, the thing is, there was no divine intervention necessary in the evolution of spirituality and religiosity. "Human Brain is the true God of all beliefs". — Abhijit Naskar

In time the earth will be inhabited by almost god-like beings who shall analyze and discuss the remnants of humanity as we now discuss the chimpanzee. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Muse, We are servants of the Mystery. We were put here on earth to act as agents of the Infinite, to bring into existence that which is not yet, but which will be, through us. Every breath we take, every heartbeat, every evolution of every cell comes from God and is sustained by God every second, just as every creation, invention, every bar of music or line of verse, every thought, vision, fantasy, every dumb-ass flop and stroke of genius comes from that infinite intelligence that created us and the universe in all its dimensions, out of the Void, the field of infinite potential, primal chaos, the Muse. To acknowledge that reality, to efface all ego, to let the work come through us and give it back freely to its source, that, in my opinion, is as true to reality as it gets. — Steven Pressfield

CANNOT BELIEVE BOTH GOSPEL AND EVOLUTION. I say most emphatically, you cannot believe in this theory of the origin of man, and at the same time accept the plan of salvation as set forth by the Lord our God. You must choose the one and reject the other, for they are in direct conflict and there is a gulf separating them which is so great that it cannot be bridged, no matter how much one may try to do so. — Joseph Fielding Smith

God's entire divine nature is wholly and entirely in all creatures, more deeply, more inwardly, more present than the creature is to itself. — Martin Luther

(About changing faith) At our best, Christians embrace it, leaving enough space within orthodoxy for God to surprise us every now and then. — Rachel Held Evans

Jim Crow repeated the old strategies of the reptilian powers of the air: to convince human beings simultaneously and paradoxically that they are gods and animals. In the Garden, after all, the snake approached God's image-bearer, directing her as though he had dominion over her (when it was, in fact, the other way around). He treated her as an animal, and she didn't even see it. At the same time, the old dragon appealed to her to transcend the limits of her dignity. If she would reach for the forbidden, she would be "like God, knowing good and evil." He suggested that she was more than a human; she was a goddess. — Russell D. Moore

Appealing to his [Einstein's] way of expressing himself in theological terms, I said: If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one. — Karl Popper

I believe in the theory of evolution, but I believe as well in the allegorical truth of creation theory. In other words, I believe that evolution, including the principle of natural selection, is one of the tools used by God to create mankind. Mankind is then a participant in the creation of the universe itself, so that we have a closed loop. I believe that there is a level on which science and religious metaphor are mutually compatible. — Christopher Langan

I am not a creationist as the term is usually understood. I believe that the earth is billions of years old and the universe even older. I do believe that God is the creator, but that's a completely different thing. I've written in defense of evolution and made arguments that are based on evolution. — Dinesh D'Souza

We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves
that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions)
who want to lead the sort of life which we once imagined supernatural beings demanded of us. An adequate evolution of morality from superstition to reason should mean recognizing ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments. — Alain De Botton

If there's a God, and we have all this evidence that there's evolution, but He created the world only 6,000 years ago - what is the best and most logical explanation to reconcile those two things? I came up with - He came up with it, of course - that all things are fakeable. — David Javerbaum

When it comes to the whole debate today over evolution versus creation, Jesus affirmed the early chapters of Genesis were accurate when He said, "Have you not read, that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female" (Matthew 19:4). Adam and Eve didn't come on the scene after billions of years of mutations and evolution. No. God created them all the way back in the beginning-just like Moses reported in the Book of Genesis. — Charlie Campbell

Human science cannot discover God. Human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry web of God's science. It works with its back to him, and is always leaving his intent and perfected work behind it. Science is always going farther and farther away from the point where his work culminates in revelation. — George MacDonald

There are only two possible explanations as to how life arose: Spontaneous generation arising to evolution or a supernatural creative act of God ... There is no other possibility. Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others, but that just leaves us with only one other possibility ... that life came as a supernatural act of creation by God, but I can't accept that philosophy because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution. — George Wald

I was in my late thirties and decided my intention in life had nothing to do with the acquiring of material things, but rather it was now my intention to experience the evolution of my own soul and to grow spiritually. I wanted to come to know the highest truths of life and to express those truths in action, through myself. I wanted to become the grandest version of the greatest idea I ever held about who I am in regards to my relationship with God. — Neale Donald Walsch

It is God who creates effects and preserves all things through God's almighty power. — Martin Luther

If only we could have talked to you, the hive-queen said in Ender's words. But since it could not be, we ask only this: that you remember us, not as enemies, but as a tragic sisters, changed into foul shape by fate or God or evolution. If we had kissed, it would have been the miracle to make us human in each other's eyes. Instead we killed each other. But still we welcome you now as guestfriends. Come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us. Blossom, trees; ripen, fields; be warm for them, suns; be fertile for them, planets: they are our adopted daughters, and they have come home. — Orson Scott Card