Michael Behe Quotes

Chance alone is at the source of all novelty, all creation in the biosphere.

Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.

Evolution advances, not by a priori design, but by the selection of what works best out of whatever choices offer. We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.

When songs fall from the sky, all I can do is catch them before they hit the ground.

It really is better to be lucky than to be good.

There's always a chance. Anything can happen.

Our studies will be forever, in a very great degree, under the direction of chance; like travelers, we must take what we can get, and when we can get it - whether it is or is not administered to us in the most commodious manner, in the most proper place, or at the exact minute when we would wish to have it.

Chance favors the well prepared. The more stuff you throw in, the more chances you have of looking like, 'I did that.'

I suppose life is a little like that, isn't it, a message in a bottle pitched out to sea, to be carried by the winds and the tides, washing up on the beaches we could never imagine.

My aspiration now is to get by luck what I could not get by merit.

Whatever happens, they say afterwards, it must have been fate. People are always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles. When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances, they say that's a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events -- the oil spilled just there, the safety fence broken just there -- that must also be a miracle. Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous.

You don’t take pictures, the good ones happen to you.

I think that's as far as you have to think, everything happens as a coincidence. It either happens or it doesn't. It's hard to map out a strategic plan by saying, 'If I do that, that's going to get me to the next level.' I think that's the wrong way to go into movies as an actor. It doesn't happen for me that way.

Truly, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach that "above all things there stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of accident, the heaven of wantonness".

On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.

It's just accidental, just temporary. Until the next accident sends me somewhere new. That's how life works.

The life we receive is not always what we choose.

NOTHING happens by coincidence.

We do not wish success yet we obtain it. Always we find what we are not looking for. These words are too true not to become a proverb some day.

Chance is the nature of our universe. [...] madness represents a chaotic reservoir of surprises. Some surprises can be valuable.

Everything that's happened to me, nothing's been planned. I've never had a business plan. I just kind of fell into it, and I liked it, and I took a chance. I took a lot of chances in my life.

How comes it to pass, if they be only moved by chance and accident, that such regular mutations and generations should be begotten by a fortuitous concourse of atoms.

It's funny how things happen in life. Sometimes, you just take the opportunity when it comes. Life can be surprising.

I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.