Pope Benedict XVI Quotes

Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!

Evolutionary theory informs our understanding of some frankly inexcusable social behavior and renders it perfectly normal.

Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different.

I am not advocating a morality based on evolution.

Those of us who believe in God and derive our sense of right and wrong and ethics from God's Word really have no difficulty whatsoever defining where our ethics come from. People who believe in survival of the fittest might have more difficulty deriving where their ethics come from. A lot of evolutionists are very ethical people.

My point of view is that men are basically animals, and I'm okay with that.

The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.

If there were no Adam and Eve and we’re all evolved from apelike ancestors and there’s homosexuality in the animal world and if Genesis is mythology, then you can justify any behavior you want.

If you say morality is just what you like, you lose the metaphysical level of what in the history of philosophy is called 'categorical imperative.'

What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found courage to say that there is none.

Moral relativism has a reputation for being compassionate, caring and humane, but it is an extremely useful philosophy for tyrants.

If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil.

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.

Politics is applied biology.

Humans have continued to evolve quite a lot over the past ten thousand years, and certainly over 100 thousand. Sure, our biology affects our behavior. But it's unlikely that humans' early evolution is deeply relevant to contemporary psychological questions about dating or the willpower to complete a dissertation.

Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

If you're going to figure something out, study ethics. You can ask What's the answer? What's Right and Wrong? What I learned is that nobody knows the answer and there is no Right and Wrong. So I'm incapable of becoming a fundamentalist because there are no absolutes, there's always a what if.

If you take Darwin's theory and extend it to its logical end, it can be used to justify a number of very horrendous things.

When most of us hear the phrase, 'survival of the fittest,' we assume it originated with Charles Darwin. It did not. The phrase doesn't exist anywhere in Darwin's first edition of 'Origin of the Species.'

When I think about life on Earth, there should not be a species like us. And if there was, we should be out in the jungle killing each other in small groups. That's what you should expect.

Spencer's god was Evolution, sometimes also called Progress.

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.

I can't think of anyone who is up on evolutionary psychology and related areas who is deluded enough to be called a utopian.

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.