A Quote by Elliott Sober

Deism is compatible with evolutionary theory.

Elliott Sober

Quote Topics

Compatible Deism Evolutionary Theory

Quote Author

Elliott Sober
Philosopher
Born: June 6, 1948

Deism is logically compatible with evolutionary theory for the simple reason that the theory says nothing about the origin of the universe or of the laws of nature.

Elliott Sober

I think that some "interventionist theisms" are compatible with evolutionary theory. (By "intervention," I don't mean that God violates laws of nature; I mean that God affects what happens in nature in ways that are additional to the ones that deism recognizes.)

Elliott Sober

I don't endorse deism or interventionist theism. My point is just that evolutionary biology is logically compatible with the former and with some versions of the latter.

Elliott Sober

The more evolutionary theory gets called an atheistic theory, the greater the risk that it will lose its place in public school biology courses in the United States. If the theory is thought of in this way, one should not be surprised if a judge at some point decides that teaching evolutionary theory violates the Constitutional principle of neutrality with respect to religion.

Elliott Sober

Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing---it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing.

Michael Crichton

Creationists have long held that evolutionary theory is atheistic; defenders of the theory do the theory no favor when they agree.

Elliott Sober

No theory of reality compatible with quantum theory can require spatially separate events to be independent.

John Stewart Bell

The hold of the evolutionary paradigm is so powerful that an idea which is more like a principle of medieval astrology than a serious twentieth century scientific theory has become a reality for evolutionary biologists.

Michael Denton

The thing about a theory in science is it allows you make predictions. Evolutionary theory allows us to predict what apples will taste good next harvest.

Bill Nye

The theory of natural selection is the centerpiece of The Origin of Species and of evolutionary theory. It is this theory that accounts for the adaptations of organisms, those innumerable features that so wonderfully equip them for survival and reproduction; it is this theory that accounts for the divergence of species from common ancestors and thus for the endless diversity of life. Natural selection is a simple concept, but it is perhaps the most important idea in biology.

Douglas J. Futuyma

I was lucky to wander into evolutionary theory, one of the most exciting and important of all scientific fields. I had never heard of it when I started at a rather tender age; I was simply awed by dinosaurs. I thought paleontologists spent their lives digging up bones and putting them together, never venturing beyond the momentous issue of what connects to what. Then I discovered evolutionary theory. Ever since then, the duality of natural history-richness in particularities and potential union in underlying explanation-has propelled me.

Stephen Jay Gould

What we call creation science makes no reference to the Bible. It says there are two possible explanations for the origin of the universe and living things: theistic, supernatural creation by an intelligent being, or nontheistic, mechanistic evolutionary theory that posits no goal and no purpose in the evolutionary process. We just happen to be here.

Duane Gish

The fundamental religious objection to the theory of evolution is not scientific but moral. [Fundamentalists believe that] evolutionary theory must be opposed because it leads to rampant immorality, on both the personal and political scales. The basic cause of this immorality is atheism.

Elizabeth S. Anderson

Evolutionary game theory was originally developed as an alternative to the hypothesis of group selection; now it is clear that game theory models postulate group selection, even if they do not use the g-word.

Elliott Sober

I have a theory that evolutionary biologists are more vain than particle physicists.