Martin Rees Quotes
We should all oppose - as Darwin did - views manifestly in conflict with the evidence, such as creationism... But we shouldn't set up this debate as 'religion v science'; instead we should strive for peaceful coexistence with at least the less dogmatic strands of mainstream religions, which number many excellent scientists among their adherents.
Rees, Martin. From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons. Profile Books, 2011.
In 1877 Wasburn was dropped from the List of Ministers by the Unitarian Church. He had become very critical of organized and orthodox religion of all kinds. He felt that literal interpretations of the Bible harmed religions as it made a mockery of God to claim His truths were the anachronistic and demonstrable falsehoods of the Book of Genesis. Today most Christians and Jews do not take the Old Testament Literally and in this sense Washburn was one of the early religious reformers of America. There is still a significant number of fundamentalist Christians and orthodox Jews who still believe in the literal truth of everything in the Bible.
This quotation is very interesting in the light of the so called “intelligent design” opponents of evolution. Darwin himself was by no means an atheist but he did not see the “hand of God in everything about him”. He did not maintain that a God could not have a hand in setting the laws of evolution which then produced all the species. However, the modern proponents of “intelligent design” insist that the evolutionary mechanism is so complex that God must have a role in the processes themselves. There are atheist evolutionists and evolutionists who believe that there was a God or prime mover setting the laws of science in motion, but all so called intelligent design enthusiasts are religious and believe that God is involved in the process. They reject the scientific method and their assertions are not subject to scientific proof or falsification. They are not scientists in contrast to the scientists who believe there was a God or prime mover initiating the process.
This was not only the case in 1852, but also true 150 years later. The only difference is that there is much more proof of Evolution, and there is a much smaller proportion of the population that questions Evolution as the fundamental mechanism by which all species have developed.
Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, OM, FRS, FREng, FMedSci, FRAS is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He is the fifteenth Astronomer Royal, appointed in 1995, and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 2004 to 2012 and President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010.
