The Atheist Bible of Quotations

Atheism is a religion. It is a worldview driven by faith in a system of thought supposedly generated by a brain that evolved from a pre-biotic soup of chemicals that randomly emits electrical impulses through its gray matter. But how can the evolved mind be trusted to know anything authoritatively or claim that certain behaviors are morally right or wrong? C.S. Lewis puts it this way: “If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our thought processes are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the materialists’ and astronomers’ as well as for anyone else’s [thought processes]. But if their thoughts—i.e., of Materialism and Astronomy—are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident would be able to give correct account of all the other accidents.”[1]

The following quotations are from a number of well known writers who are leading the way in pushing the religion of atheistic materialism. Those who believe that there is some middle ground in this debate do not understand the evangelistic zeal of the new religionists. Dewayne Wickham, who writes a column for USA Today, believes that the middle-ground approach that “divine creation and evolution can coexist.” I suggest that Mr. Wickham tell that to the atheists and see where it gets him.[2] He might want to consider why the creation-evolution debate does matter when he reads the following. If the evolutionists get their way, then can anything be right or wrong? Positions on evolution really do matter:

The Berenstain Bears: “Nature is all that IS or WAS or EVER WILL BE.”[3]

Carl Sagan: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”[4]

Larry Finkelstein (Dharma and Greg): “We’re all molecules. We’re no different from the plants and the rocks.”

“They’re just a bunch of cells.”[5]

Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA, sets forth the logical implications of materialism: “The Astonishing Hypothesis is that you—your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. . . .”[6]

Michael Ruse asserts that morality developed in the same way as hands, feet, and teeth—the “ephemeral product of the evolutionary process.”[7] According to Ruse, “Morality,” like gills in fish and lungs in homo sapiens, “is just an aid to survival and reproduction, and has no being beyond this.”[8]

Richard Dawkins: “In the universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.”[9]

Jonathan Glover: “God died in the nineteenth century and Nietzsche danced on his grave. The foundation of the external moral law was destroyed and, in its place, was a vacuum, soon gleefully filled by the narcotics of Nazism and Communism. It may not be possible to say that the death of God led directly to the death ovens; but equally, nobody can ignore the fact that the cruelest era in history was also the first to deny the existence of an external moral force.” If this is true, “can we stop the long nightmare of the twentieth century from spilling over into the twenty-first?”[10]

Julian Huxley: “We are as much a product of blind forces as is the falling of a stone to Earth or the ebb and flow of the tides. We have just happened, and man was made flesh by a long series of singularly beneficial accidents.”

“In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing has so much as a function; there was no teleology [purpose] in the world at all.”[11]

Arthur C. Clarke, best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey, a loose film adaptation of his novel The Sentinel, describes “creationism” as one of his “pet hates,” “perhaps the most pernicious of the intellectual perversions now afflicting the American public. Though I am the last person to advocate laws against blasphemy, surely nothing could be more antireligious than to deny the evidence so clearly written in the rocks for all who have eyes to see!”[12]

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”[13]

“If we are all biological accidents, why shouldn’t the white accidents own and sell the black accidents?”[14]

“Evolutionary biology . . . tells us . . . that nature has no detectable purposive forces of any kind. . . . Modern science directly implies that the world is organized strictly in accordance with deterministic principles or chance. . . . There are no purposeful principles whatsoever in nature. There are no gods and no designing forces that are rationally detectable. . . . Second, modern science directly implies that there are no inherent moral or ethical laws. . . . Third, human beings are marvelously complex machines. The individual human becomes an ethical person by means of only two mechanisms: deterministic heredity interacting with deterministic environmental influences. That is all there is. Fourth, we must conclude that when we die, we die and that is the end of us. . . . There is no hope of everlasting life. . . . Free will, as traditionally conceived, the freedom to make uncoerced and unpredictable choices among alternative possible courses of action, simply does not exist. . . . The evolutionary process cannot produce a being that is truly free to make choices. . . . The universe cares nothing for us. . . . There is no ultimate meaning for humans.”[15]

“The story is told of a visit of the behaviourist psychologist Professor Burrhus Skinner to lecture at Keele University. After Skinner had given his formal lecture, in which he emphasized an objective, mechanistic description as a total explanation of man’s behaviour, he was invited to have an informal chat with the professor who had chaired the meeting. Skinner was asked whether in fact he was at all interested in who he, the chairman, and others were. Implacable, Skinner replied: ‘I am interested in the noises coming from your mouth.’”[16]

Footnotes:
[1] C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 52–53. [2] Dewayne Wickham, “Do Positions on evolution really matter in 2008?, USA Today (June 12, 2007), 13A.**
[3]**Stan and Jan Berenstain, The Berenstain Bears in The Bears’s Nature Guide: A Nature Walk Through Bear Country (New York: Random House, 1975), [6–7].
**[4]Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), 4. [5] Leslie Stahl in an interview with Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University and author of The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis, on stem cell research (“60 Minutes,” February 11, 2006).
[6]Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis. See Daniel Voll, “Soul Searching with Francis Crick,” Omni (February 1994), 46.
[7]**Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), 268. Quoted in Paul Copan, “True for You, Not True For Me”: Deflating the Slogans that Leave Christians Speechless (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1998), 46. **[8]**Ruse, The Darwinian Paradigm, 268. **[9]Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 133.
[10]Bryan Appleyard, review of Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century in The Sunday Times (December 1999). Quoted in Vaughan Roberts, God’s Big Design: Life as he Intends it to Be (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 27.
[11]**Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991).
[12]Arthur C. Clarke, “Foreword,” in James Randi, An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), xii–xiii.
[13]Richard Lewontin, “Billions and billions of demons,” The New York Review (January 9, 1997), 31.
[14] James Scott Bell, The Darwin Conspiracy (Gresham, OR: Vision house, 1995), 64. [15] William Provine, “Progress in Evolution and Meaning in Life,” Evolutinary Progress, ed. Matthew H. Nitecki (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 47–74. Quoted in John Byl, John Byl, The Divine Challenge on Matter, Mind, Math and Meaning (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2004), 39–40. [16] Denis Alexander, Beyond Science (Philadelphia: A.J. Holman Co., 1972), 45.