Kenneth R. Miller > Quotes

“ARE WE REALLY JUST ANIMALS? Of all the questions a skeptical person might ask about Darwin, I’ve come to believe that this is the most important one. Does evolution mean that we are nothing more than beasts? Unlike questions about the age of the earth or the transitional fossils that link mammals to their reptilian ancestors, this is not the kind of question that scientists can easily answer, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s simply not a scientific question. To many of my scientific colleagues, that means that it’s not a question worth answering. But they’re wrong. In some ways, it’s the only question about Darwin’s work that really matters.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul

“It is high time that we grew up and left the Garden. We are indeed Eden’s children, yet it is time to place Genesis alongside the geocentric myth in the basket of stories that once, in a world of intellectual naivete, made helpful sense. As we walk through the gates, aware of the dazzling richness of the genuine biological world, there might even be a smile on the Creator’s face — that at long last His creatures have learned enough to understand His world as it truly is.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution

“If taken at face value, the miraculous explanation would tell us that science is not worth the trouble, that it will never yield the answers we seek, and that nature will forever be beyond all human understanding. Sterile and nonproductive in its consequences, the claim of miracle would put a lid on curiosity, experimentation, and the human creative imagination.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution

“The creationist view of natural history has always struck me not only as wrong, but as deeply impoverished. Their image of an Earth formed instantaneously and then immediately populated with all the great diversity of life is static, inflexible, unchanging, and, frankly, boring.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will

“We are living creatures, to be sure, one species among countless millions that have come and gone in our planet’s lifetime. But we are also uniquely the creatures of music and art, of poetry and laughter, of science, reason, and mathematics. We are the children of evolution in every sense, but we are children of the universe as well, and from that realization comes a new and exhilarating way to see our place among other living things and our home among the stars.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will

“It is often said that a Darwinian universe is one in which the random collisions of particles govern all events and therefore the world is without meaning. I disagree. A world without meaning would be one in which a Deity pulled the string of every human puppet, and every material particle as well.”
― Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search For Common Ground Between God And Evolution