Naturalism Quotes

“How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so much art, and for what ends were their several parts?
Was the eye contrived without skill in Opticks, and the ear without knowledge of sounds?...and these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent...?”
― Isaac Newton, Opticks: Or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light-Based on the Fourth Edition London, 1730

“God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing.”
― Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy

“The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.”
― William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design

“I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“The most essential prediction of Darwinism is that, given an astronomical number of chances, unintelligent processes can make seemingly-designed systems, ones of the complexity of those found in the cell. ID specifically denies this, predicting that in the absence of intelligent input no such systems would develop. So Darwinism and ID make clear, opposite predictions of what we should find when we examine genetic results from a stupendous number of organisms that are under relentless pressure from natural selection. The recent genetic results are a stringent test. The results: 1) Darwinism’s prediction is falsified; 2) Design’s prediction is confirmed.”
― Michael J. Behe

“The race is now on between the technoscientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it.... If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact.”
― E.O. Wilson, The Future of Life

“The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality. Phlogiston did not even exist, and yet its existence was firmly believed and the theory adhered to rigidly for nearly one hundred years throughout the eighteenth century.... As experimentation continued the properties of phlogiston became more bizarre and contradictory. But instead of questioning the existence of this mysterious substance it was made to serve more comprehensive purposes.... For the skeptic or indeed to anyone prepared to step out of the circle of Darwinian belief, it is not hard to find inversions of common sense in modern evolutionary thought which are strikingly reminiscent of the mental gymnastics of the phlogiston chemists or the medieval astronomers.

To the skeptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason. But to the Darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence!”
― Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

“Will be but corpses dressed in frocks,
who cannot speak to birds or rocks.”
― Gary Snyder

“If there is a Creator-God, it has used methods of creation that are indistinguishable from nature, it has declined to make itself known for all of recorded history, it doesn't intervene in affairs on earth, and has made itself impossible to observe. Even if you believe in that God... why would you think it would want to be worshiped?”
― David G. McAfee, Mom, Dad, I'm an Atheist: The Guide to Coming Out as a Non-Believer

“No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules?”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Calculating God

“Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality, it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.”
― Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

“Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly and quite reverently:" Deh moon looks like hell, don't it?”
― Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

“There are progressions in which the last step issui generis- incommensurable with the others - and in which to go the whole way is to undo all the labour of your previous journey. To reduce theTaoto a mere natural product is a step of that kind. Up to that point, the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

“A physicist that I know commented that many other scientific disciplines, such as geology, anthropology, astronomy, are also challenged by biblical fundamentalism, but their people seem to be able to get on with their work without worrying unduly. Only Darwinians seem thrown into a frenzy that sends them running to litigation and demanding censorship. His explanation was that it's a rival religion.”
― James P. Hogan

“Modernist discourse [...] incorporates semantic devices - such as the labeling of theism as 'religion' and naturalism as 'science' - that work to prevent a dangerous debate over fundamental assumptions from breaking out in the open.”
― Phillip E. Johnson, Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law Education

“Things that look like they were designed, probably were... If intelligence is an operative component of the universe, a science that methodologically excludes its existence will be susceptible to being trapped in an endless chase for materialistic causes that do not exist... Where there are sufficient grounds for inferring intelligent causation, based on evidence of" specified complexity, "it should be considered as a component of scientific theories.

Inclusion of intelligent causation in the scientific equation is not novel and has not impeded the practice of science in the past, e.g. Newton and Kepler, in an age when science was not constrained by a philosophical materialism, and by many current scientists who have remained open to following the evidence where it leads.”
― Donald L. Ewert

“Priusquam autem ad creationem, hoc est ad finem omnis disputationis, veniamus: tentanda omnia existimo.

However, before we come to [special] creation, which puts an end to all discussion: I think we should try everything else.”
― Johannes Kepler, Johannes Kepler New Astronomy

“Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“Be healthy by being outdoors in the natural daylight with nature!”
― Steven Magee, Light Forensics

“Naturalism is the view that the physical world is a self-contained system that works by blind, unbroken natural laws. Naturalism doesn't come right out and say there's nothing beyond nature. Rather, it says that nothing beyond nature could have any conceivable relevance to what happens in nature. Naturalism's answer to theism is not atheism but benign neglect. People are welcome to believe in God, though not a God who makes a difference in the natural order.”
― William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design

“The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.”
― Lewis Thomas

“Ahistorical commentators who too readily dismiss Nietzsche's interest in physiological questions (e.g., DeMan 1979: 119; Nehamas 1985: 120) miss the centrality of such ways of thinking to Nietzsche's naturalism and to the whole intellectual climate of the period. 'The naturalization of the image of man under the influence of natural science was the work of the materialist movement of the middle of the century' (Schnädelbach 1983: 229). In this regard, Nietzsche was very much a thinker of his times.”
― Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality

“Eat beautiful foods, which are nutritionally dense, wholesome and natural.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“And that’s the message. That’s it. That’s all.
Nothing more than what happens when things come together, when hydrogen, say, meets oxygen, or a story from then meets a story from now, or stone meets water meets girl meets boy meets bird meets hand meets wing meets bone meets light meets dark meets eye meets word meets world meets grain of sand meets thirst meets hunger meets need meets dream meets real meets same meets different meets death meets life meets end meets beginning all over again, the story of nature itself, ever-inventive, making one thing out of another, and one thing into another, and nothing lasts, and nothing’s lost, and nothing ever perishes, and things can always change, because things will always change, and things will always be different, because things can always be different.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

“I cannot truly imagine a truly great person who hasn't suffered.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“You can find gods signature in the artwork of nature.”
― Natasha Potter

“If you look long enough, you'll find that god hides in nature.”
― Natasha Potter

“There are wide boulevards in Paris lined with trees," he told her, spreading his arms expansively. "The buildings are nearly as big as our dunes."

Her eyes widened. "Why on earth would anyone wish to live in such a crowded place?" she asked. "Why would they wish to live in a house built of unmoving stone? Why would they wish a roof over their heads? How would they know the sky? How would they know freedom?" She shook her head. "It is odd that people choose to live in such a backward fashion. It is no better than the harratin who till the soil, forever chained to there are plots of land.”
― David Ball, Empires of Sand by David Ball

“She understood this new phenomenon of overabundance to be born of the arrival of yet more of her people in the land. There was a new imbalance, a strangeness unsustainable. Henceforth, there would be far too much in some directions and in others a wretched poverty.”
― Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

“If human mind perseveres long enough, every mystery soon reveals its truth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations