Michael Ruse famous quotes

03-24-2025

Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.
-- Michael Ruse

#Today #Evolution #Stills
The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist, and the McGraths show why.
-- Michael Ruse

#Atheist #Embarrassed #Delusion
Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth . . . Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, [ethics] is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says, 'Love thy neighbor as thyself,' they think they are referring above and beyond themselves . . . Nevertheless, . . . such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, and any deeper meaning is illusory . . .
-- Michael Ruse

#Thinking #Hands #Feet
Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion - a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint - ...and Mr. Gish is but one of many to make it - the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution today.
-- Michael Ruse

#Christian #Alternatives #Today
Being a philosophical naturalist does not mean that one thinks that science can provide all of the answers. That is scientism and that is wrong. I don't think a billion buckets of science could speak to the problems raised by the Tea Party. Being a philosophical naturalist does not mean that one thinks that the only truths are those of science. I think the claim just made in the last sentence is true but I don't think it is a claim of science. It means that you use science where you can and you respect and try to emulate its standards.
-- Michael Ruse

#Philosophical #Party #Mean
Their [the new atheists] treatment of the religious viewpoint is pathetic to the point of non-being. Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. Proudly he criticizes that whereof he knows nothing.
-- Michael Ruse

#Religious #Atheist #Philosophy
In particular, I argue that in both evolution and creation we have rival religious responses to a crisis of faith-rival stories of origins, rival judgments about he meaning of human life, rival sets of moral dictates, and above all what theologians call rival eschatologies-pictures of the future and of what lies ahead for humankind.
-- Michael Ruse

#Religious #Lying #Stories
...I really want to believe. I find the goodies offered by Christianity extremely attractive. But I am damned (again!) if I am going to sell my evolutionary birthright for a mess of religious pottage.
-- Michael Ruse

#Religious #Believe #Want
We who cherish science should be careful to distinguish when we are doing science and when we are extrapolating from it
-- Michael Ruse

#Cherish #Should #Be Careful
In other words, science tells us that Adam and Eve are fictions. That Saint Paul or Uncle Tom Cobley and all thought otherwise is irrelevant. They were wrong.
-- Michael Ruse

#Uncles #Saint #Fiction

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