One of the reasons why I became a creationist many years ago was the fact that I began
reading books and articles written by evolutionists.  Before that I had been what might be called a "Christian evolutionist," although I now agree with the humanists that that particular term is an oxymoron.  Since Jesus Christ was certainly a creationist (in fact He was the Creator!), and since a Christian is presumably one who believes in the person, work and teachings of Christ, it now seems anomalous to try to believe in evolution while professing to be a follower of Christ.

Anyway, while serving as a young engineering instructor on the faculty of a secular
university, and also trying to be a faculty advisor to a Christian student club on campus, it soon became obvious that the Bible, if taken literally, contradicted my rather naive acceptance of the evolutionism I had been taught in high school and college.  This conflict became especially apparent when I tried to answer questions by students we were trying to reach for Christ.  This was during World War II, and most of the students were naval trainees sent by the Navy to study science and engineering.

Accordingly, I began an intensive study of both the Bible and the literature on evolution in
the university library—of which there was an abundance.  Two important conclusions resulted from this study.

First, a verse-by-verse study of the entire Bible made it crystal clear that there was no way
the Bible could legitimately be harmonized with evolutionary theory.  Conversely, the Bible
yielded numerous evidences of its own divine inspiration, and spoke accurately whenever it
touched on real science, even containing many scientific insights that were not confirmed by actual scientific studies until thousands of years later.

Secondly, my reading in the evolutionary books and articles convinced me that evolutionism was nothing but a philosophical belief with no scientific proof whatever.  The types of speculative evidences cited in this literature were in no way commensurate with the scientific data required in engineering design, for example.  The "scientific method" so often mentioned in the scientific engineering literature stressed the necessity of actual study and measurement of observable systems and processes, with further replication and confirmation.

But evolutionism offered none of this.  No real evolution from one kind to a different kind
had ever been observed in all known history, and the supposed prehistoric record in the fossils yielded no true macro-evolutionary transitional series whatever—only a few questionable mosaics such as the oft-cited Archaeopteryx.

As much as anything, therefore, the evolutionary literature convinced me of the necessary
truth of primeval special creation.  This, of course, was also what I had found the Bible to teach.

That was over fifty years ago.  Since that time I have continued to read very extensively the
writings by evolutionists, and have also continued to study the Bible daily.  And everything I
have ever read, in both fields, continues to confirm ever more strongly the fact that the
evolutionary philosophy is completely false.  The universe and all its systems, particularly the many kinds of organisms on Earth, were supernaturally created by God.

In my subsequent writing and speaking on this seminal subject of origins, I have found it
most useful to refer frequently to writings by evolutionists in showing the evidence for creation as opposed to evolution.  Many of my books, as well as my lectures and debates, have been punctuated with rather extensive documentation from the statements of evolutionists.

Over these past fifty years, therefore, I have collected numerous quotes from evolutionists
that were useful for this purpose.  My son and successor, Dr. John Morris, along with various others, have been suggesting for some time now that others could find this collection useful too.

Whether or not such a compilation is a good idea remains to be seen, but I have finally done
that in this volume, and am submitting it for whatever use other creationist writers and speakers might be able to make of it.  The format consists of fifteen chapters, each divided into three sections, corresponding to a total of forty-five general topics covered by the quotations.  Each of these sections begins with a brief description and summary of the significance of that particular topic to the creation/evolution issue.  Then the quotes in each section are arranged alphabetically by authors.

Since the quotes cover a wide range of years, as well as subjects, they are not all up to date.  However, the reader should find even the older ones fascinating and useful.  To some degree, they illustrate the changes in evolutionary thought over the past fifty years or so.  The great majority, of course, are fairly recent.

Almost all are quotes by evolutionists, and these people certainly were not writing with the
intention of supporting creationism.  This fact may elicit charges that some quotes are taken out of context, but I don’t think any of them misrepresent in any way the intent of the writers when they wrote what they did. In any case, the reference is given, so readers can check it out for themselves if they wish.

All quotes are relatively brief, but I believe all are relevant to the creation/evolution
question.  We have tried to check the accuracy of them whenever possible, but with so many quotes (about 3,500), there may still be some inaccuracies.  I hope—and believe—that these are few and inconsequential.  I would appreciate it, of course, if anyone does find an error, if he would let me know, so it can be corrected in possible future printings.

Although most quotes are from evolutionists, I have included a few from creationists when
they were particularly relevant to the subject.  I believe the context will alert readers whenever this is the case.

Finally, I must acknowledge with real appreciation the valuable work of my daughter and
secretary, Mrs. Mary Ruth Smith, who not only typed and organized the whole manuscript from my collection of quotes on index cards, but also checked their accuracy in so far as possible, spending much time in libraries for this purpose.  Even though this is an unusual sort of book, we trust it will be of interest and value to at least a few key people.

Henry M. Morris

Chapter

1. Origin and History of the Universe

A. Cosmic Evolution

B. Origin of Stars and Galaxies

C. The Impossible Solar System

2. Origin of Living Systems

A. Life from Non-Life

B. Complexity and Probability of Life

C. Exobiology

3. The Impossibility of Evolution

A. The Barrier of Thermodynamics

B. Entropy and Probability Versus Evolution

C. Supposed Order from Disorder

4. Evolutionary Genetics

A. The Nature of Gene Mutations

B. Molecular Homologies and Evolution

C. Genetic Mysteries

5. The Evolutionary Paradigm

A. The Dogmatic Evolutionists

B. The Uneasy Evolutionists

C. Concern with Creationism

6. The Origin of Species

A. Natural Selection and Classification

B. Stasis and Punctuated Equilibrium

C. Mysteries of Adaptation and Speciation

7. The Record of the Fossils

A. The Strategic Role of the Fossils

B. The Vital Gaps in the Record

C. The Alleged Transitional Forms

8. The Origin of Man

A. The Hominid Fossils

B. The Genus Homo

C. Origin of Civilization

9. The Geologic Column and Its Fossils

A. Fossils and Geologic Dating

B. Problems in Fossil Chronology

C. Fossil Graveyards

10. The Rapid Formation of the Geologic Column

A. Neo-Catastrophism versus Uniformitarianism

B. Rapid Processes Everywhere

C. The Testimony of the Column

11. Geochronology and Its Hidden Assumptions

A. Radiometric Dating

B. Other Methods of Geochronometry

C. Dating of Recent Events

12. History of Evolutionary Thought

A. America and Its Creationist Being

B. Darwin and His Predecessors

C. The Ancient Evolutionists

13. The Modern War Against God

A. The Current Creation-Evolution Conflict

B. The Agenda of Atheism and Humanism

C. The Impact of Evolutionism on Religion

14. The Corrupt Fruits of Evolution

A. The Cruel Basis of Evolutionism

B. Communism and Nazism

C. Social Darwinism and Racism

15. Evolution and Modern Issues

A. Problems in Human Behavior

B. The New Age

C. Evolutionary Miscellany

List of Authors

The theory currently in vogue on the origin of the universe is the so-called "Big Bang" theory, according to which the cosmos suddenly came into existence, sometime between 8 and 20 billion years ago by a primordial explosion of an infinitesimal particle of "space/time," which then evolved into everything else. However, many evolutionary astronomers and cosmologists are now raising serious doubts about this theory, as indicated by the sampling of quotes shown below from their writings.

Alfvén, Hannes and Asoka Mendis, "Interpretation of Observed Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation," Nature, vol. 266 (April 21, 1977), pp. 698-699. At the time of writing these authors were in the Department of Physics at the University of California at San Diego.

p. 698

"The observed cosmic microwave background radiation, which has a high degree of spatial isopropy and which closely fits a 2.7K black body spectrum, is generally claimed to be the strongest piece of evidence in support of hot big bang cosmologies by its proponents."

p. 698

"The claim that this radiation lends strong support to hot big bang cosmologies is without foundation."

Anonymous, "Big-Bang Bias," Scientific American, vol. 254 (June 1986), pp. 66-67.

p. 66

"The big-bang theory of the universe holds that all galaxies are rushing uniformly away from one another as the result of a primordial explosion that took place 15 to 20 billion years ago. A group of American and British astronomers has suggested that the expansion may not be so uniform after all."

p. 67

"They found that galaxies in one hemisphere of the 350-million-light-year spherical volume are receding more slowly than galaxies in the other hemisphere…. In other words, the uniform expansion caused by the big bang is skewed by a net drift velocity of 700 kilometers per second."

Arp, H. C., G. Burbidge, F. Hoyle, J. V. Narlikar, and N. C. Wickramasinghe, "The Extragalactic Universe: An Alternative View," Nature, vol. 346 (August 30, 1990), pp. 807-812.

p. 809

"The microwave background has no imprints to mark the occurrence of such events, contradicting the theoretical expectations of a decade ago and causing theoreticians in recent years to search for variants of the Big Bang that avoid a confrontation with observation on this point. Our opinion is that avoiding confrontation with observation is not the hallmark of a good theory.

"The Big Bang model offers a Universe created in a smooth featureless condition, out of which a highly structured Universe is nevertheless supposed to have evolved. Numerous attempts have been made to explain how this miracle is supposed to have happened. They have two features in common, one a retreat into the highest flights of physics and the other an unsatisfactory absence of the immense detail that would be required to support them in a proper manner, from which we suspect the attempts to be little more than ingenious handwaving. Perhaps this is why they are called ‘scenarios.’

"The root of the matter, it seems to us, is one of time-ordering. In the Big Bang model, the microwave background came first and the galaxies second, whereas the observations suggest (almost to the point of compelling) the opposite."

p. 810

"The commonsense inference from the planckian nature of the spectrum of the microwave background and from the smoothness of the background is that, so far as microwaves are concerned, we are living in a fog and that the fog is relatively local. A man who falls asleep on the top of a mountain and who wakes in a fog does not think he is looking at the origin of the Universe. He thinks he is in a fog."

p. 810

"We conclude this section by emphasizing that each of these arguments which was used in the debate some twenty years ago concerning the viability of the steady-state cosmology is still with us and on balance the steady-state model is favoured."

p. 810

"The above discussion clearly indicates that the present evidence does not warrant an implicit belief in the standard hot Big Bang picture."

p. 811

"It is commonly supposed that the so-called primordial abundances of D, ^{3He, 4He and 7Li provide strong evidence for Big Bang cosmology. But a particular value for the baryon-to-photon ratio needs to be assumed ad hoc to obtain the required abundances. A theory in which results are obtained only through ad hoc assumptions can hardly be considered to acquire much merit thereby."}

^{p. 812}

^{"The conventional critic may argue that from the standpoint of economy of postulates the idea of ‘many’ creation events is a lot worse than the notion of the single creation (The Big Bang). We disagree. The ‘many’ events in our alternative theory are potentially observable and satisfy the repeatability criterion of physical theories. The Big Bang satisfies neither of these requirements, and hence as a scientific hypothesis fails to compete with the alternative proposed here.}

^{"Cosmology is unique in science in that it is a very large intellectual edifice based on a very few facts."}

Asimov, Isaac, "What is Beyond the Universe?" Science Digest, vol. 69 (April 1974), pp. 69-70.

p. 69

"Where did the substance of the universe come from? What is beyond the edge of the universe?

p. 69

"If 0 = (+ 1) + (- 1), then something which is 0 might just as well become +1 and -1. Perhaps in an infinite sea of nothingness, globs of positive and negative energy in equal-sized pairs are constantly forming, and after passing through evolutionary changes, combining once more and vanishing. We are in one of these globs in the period of time between nothing and nothing, and wondering about it."

Bludman, S. A., "Thermodynamics and the End of a Closed Universe," Nature, vol. 308 (March 22, 1984), pp. 319-322 Bludman was in the Department of Physics, University of Pennsylvania.

p. 319

"We show that, so far as present observations are concerned, the Universe may be open or closed, monotonically expanding or reversing. We then show … that even if the present expansion were to reverse, the Universe cannot bounce in the future, but must end in a ‘final crunch.’ … Finally, we show that if space is closed and the Universe began with low entropy, then it had to begin, not with a big bang, but with a non-singular tepid little bang."

p. 322

"We now appreciate that, because of the huge entropy generated in our Universe, far from oscillating, a closed universe can only go through one cycle of expansion and contraction. Whether closed or open, reversing or monotonically expanding, the severely irreversible phase transitions transpiring give the Universe a definite beginning, middle and end."

Burbidge, Geoffrey, "Why Only One Big Bang?" Scientific American (February 1992), p. 120.

p. 120

"Big Bang cosmology is probably as widely believed as has been any theory of the universe in the history of Western civilization. It rests, however, on many untested, and in some cases untestable, assumptions. Indeed, big bang cosmology has become a bandwagon of thought that reflects faith as much as objective truth."

p. 120

"This situation is particularly worrisome because there are good reasons to think the big bang model is seriously flawed."

p. 120

"Why then has the big bang become so deeply entrenched in modern thought? Everything evolves as a function of time except for the laws of physics. Hence, there are two immutables: the act of creation and the laws of physics, which spring forth fully fashioned from that act. The big bang ultimately reflects some cosmologists’ search for creation and for a beginning. That search properly lies in the realm of metaphysics, not science."

Chown, Marcus, "Giant Structure Spells Trouble for Cosmology," New Scientist, vol. 129 (February 23, 1991), p. 24.

p. 24

"The discovery of the largest known structure in the Universe could plunge cosmology into crisis. Theorists are going to find it extremely difficult to explain how a long band of quasars stretching hundreds of millions of light years across space could have formed so early in the life of the Universe."

p. 24

"‘By rights,’ he says, ‘quasars should not cluster at all, but be spread quite randomly across the sky.’  Clowes says the discovery of the quasar band is ‘another nail in the coffin of cold dark matter.’"

p. 24

"Cold dark matter seems unable to explain the structures astronomers observe on the largest scales in the Universe. Hot dark matter, the alternative, has already been ruled out by astronomers. Theorists would seem to have some serious thinking to do to resolve the problem."

Cowen, Ron, "Searching for Cosmology’s Holy Grail," Science News, vol. 146 (October 8, 1994), pp. 232-234.

p. 232

"How old is the universe?

"After years of fractious debate, astronomers still don’t know the answer. Some believe the universe is 10 billion years old, others argue that it’s closer to 20 billion. At the center of the controversy lies a number that has obsessed astronomers for decades—the Hubble constant."

p. 232

"The trouble is, no one can agree on the size of this constant. At best, astronomers have pinned the number down to within a factor of 2. Based on conflicting sets of observations and personal prejudices, two camps have sprung up since the 1970s. Several groups of researchers, using different measurement methods, favor a high value for the Hubble constant. This suggests a relatively small, young universe—one that began its expansion about 10 billion years ago. Others argue for a low Hubble constant, implying a cosmos about twice as old."

p. 234

"That would make many theorists happy, because such an age doesn’t conflict with the estimated age of globular clusters—dense groupings of stars in the Milky Way and other galaxies that appear to be about 16 billion years old."

Croswell, Ken, "The Constant Hubble War," New Scientist, vol. 137 (February 13, 1993), pp. 22-23.

p. 22

"The Hubble constant has a direct bearing on the age of the Universe because the faster it is expanding, the less time it must have taken to reach its present size since the big bang, and so the younger it must be. A high value—about 70—suggests the Universe is younger than its oldest stars, a logical contradiction that would destroy the big bang theory."

p. 22

"In the past five years, however, many younger and formerly uncommitted astronomers, using new techniques, have swung towards the ‘high’ side, supporting de Vaucouleurs."

pp. 22-23

"But how can both sides use ‘reliable methods’ to reach such widely different conclusions? And what constitutes a ‘reliable method’? The Canadian astronomer Sidney van den Bergh frequently writes reviews that try to sort out the mess, and is aligned with neither side. One that he wrote last year began with a quote from Mark Twain: ‘The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable that, if they continue, we shall soon know nothing at all about it.’"

Croswell, Ken, "Popular Theory of Cosmology is in Trouble," New Scientist, vol. 142 (April 16, 1994), p. 18.

p. 18

"The Universe probably has only a fraction of the mass needed to halt and reverse its expansion, say two astronomers in the U.S. Their finding strikes a blow at the popular inflation theory, which holds that the Universe will neither collapse nor expand forever but instead lies poised on the knife edge between the two."

p. 18

"‘It seems to us that no successful MDM [mixed dark matter] model can or will be found,’ they write. ‘It may be that the observations are pushing us firmly towards a serious consideration of open models,’ in which the Universe expands forever. If so, the Universe has less mass than inflation theory predicts, and the theory is wrong."

Crowe, Richard A. "Is Quantum Cosmology Science?" Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 1995), pp. 53-54. Crowe is Chairman of Physics and Astronomy, University of Hawaii.

p. 54

"What about the more speculative quantum genesis, which would have preceded the inflationary era? Let me start by saying that many people believe that everything in nature has to have a causal explanation. Although this may be true at the macroscopic level, it is not necessarily the case at the microscopic level, as quantum physics has demonstrated. Transitions, decays, and nuclear reactions do sometimes occur spontaneously without apparent cause. Similarly, the universe itself does not require a cause."

Darling, David, "On Creating Something from Nothing," New Scientist, vol. 151 (September 14, 1996).

p. 49

"What is a big deal—the biggest deal of all—is how you get something out of nothing."

"Don’t let the cosmologists try to kid you on this one. They have not got a clue either—despite the fact that they are doing a pretty good job of convincing themselves and others that this is really not a problem. ‘In the beginning,’ they will say, ‘there was nothing—no time, space, matter or energy. Then there was a quantum fluctuation from which …’ Whoa! Stop right there. You see what I mean? First there is nothing, then there is something. And the cosmologists try to bridge the two with a quantum flutter, a tremor of uncertainty that sparks it all off. Then they are away and before you know it, they have pulled a hundred billion galaxies out of their quantum hats."

p. 49

"You cannot fudge this by appealing to quantum mechanics. Either there is nothing to begin with, in which case there is no quantum vacuum, no pre-geometric dust, no time in which anything can happen, no physical laws that can effect a change from nothingness into somethingness; or there is something, in which case that needs explaining."

Davies, Paul C., "Universe in Reverse: Can Time Run Backwards?" Second Look (London: King’s College, September 1979), pp. 26-28.

p. 27

"The greatest puzzle is where all the order in the universe came from originally. How did the cosmos get wound up, if the second law of thermodynamics predicts asymmetric unwinding towards disorder?"

p. 27

"There is good evidence that the primeval universe was not ordered, but highly chaotic: A relic of the primordial chaos survives in a curious radiation from space, believed to be the last fading remnant of the primeval heat, and the characteristics of its spectrum reveal that in the earliest moments of the universe the cosmological material was completely unstructured.

"To discover the cosmic winding mechanism, one has to investigate the processes that occurred between about one second and ten minutes after the bang. Unfortunately, the expansion is now too sluggish to have much invigorating effect, so the universe seems doomed to steadily unwind again until all organized activity ceases; the interesting and varied world of our experience will be systematically destroyed."

p. 27

"So far it has been supposed that the shuffling process … is random. But how do we know that the universe which emerged from the big bang was truly chaotic so that subsequent collisions between atoms and interactions between subatomic particles are overwhelmingly likely to disintegrate any order which may appear? If the miracle of the big bang included miraculously organized subatomic arrangements too, then random shuffling would have to be replaced by organized rearrangement.

"Such an idea might be called a cosmic conspiracy in which vast numbers of particles will some time in the future operate in concert to rearrange the world back to its former more ordered conditions, thereby causing time to run backwards."

Davies, Paul C., "What Hath COBE Wrought?" Sky and Telescope (January 1993), pp. 4-5.

p. 4

"When the Big Bang theory became popular in the 1950s many people used it to support the belief that the universe was created by God at some specific moment in the past. And some still regard the Big Bang as ‘the creation’—a divine act to be left beyond the scope of science."

p. 4

"However, this sort of armchair theology is wide of the mark. The popular idea of a God who sets the universe going like a clockwork toy and then sits back to watch was ditched by the Church in the last century."

p. 4

"Quantum events do not need well-defined prior causes; they can be regarded as spontaneous fluctuations. It is then possible to imagine the universe coming into being from nothing entirely spontaneously, without violating any laws.

"Although quantum cosmology must be regarded as highly speculative, it does make some predictions. Remarkably, the data gleaned from COBE bear the hallmark of a quantum origin for the cosmos. It is therefore scientifically plausible to consider a universe with no need for an external creator in the traditional sense."

Davies, Paul C., The Last Three Minutes (London: Orion Books, 1994), 162 pp.

p. 45

"Life-giving carbon and oxygen, the gold in our banks, the lead sheeting on our roofs, the uranium fuel rods of our nuclear reactors—all owe their terrestrial presence to the death throes of stars that vanished well before our sun existed. It is an arresting thought that the very stuff of our bodies is composed of the nuclear ash of long-dead stars."

p. 118

"In this chapter and the last, I have tried to provide a glimpse of a universe slowing down but perhaps never quite running out of steam completely, of bizarre science-fiction creatures eking out an existence against odds that become stacked forever higher against them, testing their ingenuity against the inexorable logic of the second law of thermodynamics. The image of their desperate but not necessarily futile struggle for survival may exhilarate some readers and depress others. My own feelings are mixed."

p. 155

"If there is a purpose to the universe, and it achieves that purpose, then the universe must end, for its continued existence would be gratuitous and pointless. Conversely, if the universe endures forever, it is hard to imagine that there is any ultimate purpose to the universe at all. So cosmic death may be the price that has to be paid for cosmic success. Perhaps the most that we can hope for is that the purpose of the universe becomes known to our descendants before the end of the last three minutes."

de Vaucouleurs, G., "The Case for a Hierarchical Cosmology," Science, vol. 167 (February 27, 1970), pp. 1203-1213.

p. 1203

"Less than 50 years after the birth of what we are pleased to call ‘modern cosmology,’ when so few empirical facts are passably well established, when so many different over-simplified models of the universe are still competing for attention, is it, may we ask, really credible to claim, or even reasonable to hope, that we are presently close to a definitive solution of the cosmological problem?"

p. 1212

"It seems safe to conclude that a unique solution of the cosmological problem may still elude us for quite some time."

Dingle, Herbert, "Science and Modern Cosmology," Science, vol. 120 (October 1, 1954), pp. 513-521.

p. 515

"We are told that matter is being continually created, but in such a way that the process is imperceptible—that is, the statement cannot be disproved. When we ask why we should believe this, the answer is that the ‘perfect cosmological principle’ requires it. And when we ask why we should accept this ‘principle,’ the answer is that the fundamental axiom of science requires it. This we have seen to be false, and the only other answer that one can gather is that the ‘principle’ must be true because it seems fitting to the people who assert it. With all respect, I find this inadequate."

p. 519

"So far as I can judge, the authors of this new cosmology are primarily concerned about the great difficulty which must face all systems that contemplate a changing universe—namely, how can we conceive it to have begun? They are not content to leave this question unanswered until further knowledge comes; all problems must be solved now. Nor, for some reason, are they content to suppose that at some period in the distant past something happened that does not continually happen now. It seems to them better to suppose that there was no beginning and will be no ending to the material universe, and therefore, tacitly assuming that the universe must conform to their tastes, they declare that this must have been the case."

Dirac, P. A. M., "The Evolution of the Physicist’s Picture of Nature," Scientific American, vol. 208 (May 1963), pp. 45-53. Dirac was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

p. 53

"There is one other line along which one can still proceed by theoretical means. It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better."

Guth, Alan H., "Cooking Up a Cosmos," Astronomy, vol. 25 (September 1997), pp. 54-57.

p. 54

"Since the big bang theory implies that the entire observed universe can evolve from a tiny speck, it’s tempting to ask whether a universe can in principle be created in a laboratory. Given what we know of the laws of physics, would it be possible for an extraordinarily advanced civilization to create new universes at will?"

p. 54

"So, to produce a universe by the standard big-bang description, one must start with the energy of 10 billion universes!"

p. 54

"So, in the inflationary theory the universe evolves from essentially nothing at all, which is why I frequently refer to it as the ultimate free lunch."

Guth, Alan H., and Paul J. Steinhardt, "The Inflationary Universe," Scientific American, vol. 250 (May 1984), p. 116-128.

p. 128

"From a historical point of view probably the most revolutionary aspect of the inflationary model is the notion that all the matter and energy in the observable universe may have emerged from almost nothing."

p. 128

"The inflationary model of the universe provides a possible mechanism by which the observed universe could have evolved from an infinitesimal region. It is then tempting to go one step further and speculate that the entire universe evolved from literally nothing."

Hawking, Stephen W., "The Edge of Spacetime," American Scientist, vol. 72 (July/August 1984), pp. 355-359.

p. 355

"The Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, on the other hand, did not like the thought of such direct divine intervention in the affairs of the world and so mostly preferred to believe that the universe had existed and would exist forever."

p. 357

"One could still imagine the universe being created by an external agent in a state corresponding to some time after the Big Bang, but it would not have any meaning to say that it was created before the Big Bang."

Hawking, Stephen W., A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), 198 pp.

p. vii

"I was again fortunate in that I chose theoretical physics, because that it is all in the mind. So my disability has not been a serious handicap."

p. x

"Hawking embarks on a quest to answer Einstein’s famous question about whether God had any choice in creating the universe. Hawking is attempting, as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of God. And this makes all the more unexpected the conclusion of the effort, at least so far: a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a Creator to do."

p. 37

"Stars are so far away that they appear to us to be just pinpoints of light. We cannot see their size or shape. So how can we tell different types of stars apart? For the vast majority of stars, there is only one characteristic feature that we can observe—the color of their light."

p. 42

"Now at first sight, all of this evidence that the universe looks the same whichever direction we look in might seem to suggest there is something special about our place in the universe. In particular, it might seem that if we observe all other galaxies to be moving away from us, then we must be at the center of the universe. There is, however, an alternate explanation: the universe might look the same in every direction as seen from any other galaxy, too. This, as we have seen, was Friedmann’s second assumption. We have no scientific evidence for, or against, this assumption. We believe it only on grounds of modesty: it would be most remarkable if the universe looked the same in every direction around us, but not around other points in the universe!"

p. 55

"We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determines events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us ordinary mortals."

p. 102

"A precise statement of this idea is known as the second law of thermodynamics. It states that the entropy of an isolated system always increases, and that when two systems are joined together, the entropy of the combined system is greater than the sum of the entropies of the individual systems."

p. 116

"At the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the pope. He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference—the possibility that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation."

p. 140

"With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started—it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But, if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?"

Horgan, John, "Big-Bang Bashers," Scientific American, vol. 257 (September 1987), pp. 22-24.

p. 22

"Like the theory of evolution, the big-bang model has undergone modification and refinement, but it has resisted all serious challenges.

"Nevertheless, ever since the theory won general acceptance about 20 years ago a few scientists have persistently attacked some of its fundamental assumptions. One group of critics argues that electromagnetic forces generated by plasma have been more important than gravity in shaping the universe; another asserts that red shifts are not necessarily a relic of the big bang’s continuing outward thrust."

p. 22

"The elder statesman of the plasma dissidents is Hannes Alfvén of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Alfvén, who won the Nobel prize for physics in 1970, believes interstellar space is filled with long filaments and other structures of plasma, that is, electrons and positively charged ions. The same electromagnetic forces that push plasmas into distinctive shapes in the laboratory, Alfvén says, caused this cosmic plasma to coalesce into galaxies, stars and planetary systems."

p. 22

"Although some plasma dissidents are also red-shift dissidents, the putative dean of the latter group, Halton C. Arp of the Mount Wilson and Las Campanas Observatories, says he does not share Alfvén’s ‘plasma approach.’"

p. 22

"Arp says he has observed many objects with red shifts that do not conform to the Hubble relation. He maintains that quasars, for example, whose large red shifts suggest they are the most distant objects in the universe, are actually no more distant than galaxies and are probably offshoots of them."

p. 24

"Theorists are particularly disturbed, Jeremiah P. Ostriker of Princeton University notes, by the growing evidence of large scale inhomogeneity in the universe’s structure, which conflicts with the uniformity of the cosmic background radiation."