Seth Shostak Quotes

Scientists and creationists are always at odds, of course.

How can you look at the Texas legislature and still believe in intelligent design?

By no definition of any modern scientist is intelligent design science, and it's a waste of our students' time to subject them to it.

I have issues with anyone who tries to claim that science is unworkable - creationists who deny evidence for past history, yet are happy to benefit from the products of the methodology that they otherwise deny.

I was defeated by an elite group in Washington that have an agenda, the National Academy of Sciences and other science groups. They have an agenda to get evolution presented as hard, dogmatic fact. It is pure propaganda.

But whereas skepticism and uncertainty have always been the heart and soul of science, confidence and certainty are the coin of the realm in much of today’s public discourse. Unquestioning confidence is deeply troubling for the scientific community because it is not the currency we trade in, and it has led people in America and around the world to question scientific enterprise itself. We should all be troubled when science is treated as if it were an ideology rather than a discipline.

There's been an incredible censorship in America and throughout the world, but particularly in America where students aren't even allowed to critically think about evolution, the issue of origins; they are not allowed to hear other points of view; they are taught incorrectly about science and taught that evolution is fact.

We don't regard any scientific theory as the absolute truth.

The worst censors are those prohibiting criticism of the theory of evolution in the classroom.

For students, the evolution-creation discussion can be a useful exercise, for it can help develop their critical thinking skills.

Teaching creationism in science class as an alternative to evolution is inappropriate.

So one reason the science educators panic at the first sign of public rebellion is that they fear exposure of the implicit religious content in what they are teaching.

To prevent discussion of any other explanations of human origins is hardly what I would expect from open-minded educators.

Far too many scientists, including my good friend Richard Dawkins, present science as the truth and present it as factually correct. And actually, of course, that clearly isn't true.

The information and the materials [of “Intelligent Design”] aren't scientific, it's not a compromise. You either include non-scientific materials or you don't. And in a science class, we don't include non-scientific, non-empirically based material.

But I firmly believe that evolution be taught in the schools has the best witness of what modern science has taught us. To read the Bible literalistically about such issues disinvites us from using the best of recent scholarships

It is unconstitutional to teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.

Intelligent design is nothing less than the progeny of creationism.

As a matter of principle, science teachers are professionally bound to limit their teaching to science and should resist pressure [from religious fundamentalists] to do otherwise.

I have been raised to believe in freedom of thought and speech. If a minority wishes to accept that position [creationism], it's their right. What I fear is that this minority may seem to be larger than it truly is. What is strange is that there are still people who believe the world is not a globe.

Science today is still affected by non-scientific belief. Eighty percent of the South still rejects evolution.

Anti-Evolution League

I don’t want to offend anyone of faith, but I think that science has some more compelling explanation than a divine creator

Creationists make it sound as though a “theory” is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

When people don’t like the results that they are getting from honest scientific research, they try and discredit the researchers and the methods..