Many of these is handily refuted at
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/contents.html
The superstitious religious nutters who fear the implications that the fact of evolution might have on their patriarchal cults like to scour the internet and libraries for quotes they can cull together in out of context lists as if it means anything.
If one of these guys (they're almost
always male) actually had any sort of education on the topic, they would pick the most significant few and be prepared to discuss the quotes in their original contexts.
As an example, Darknight offers this quote from the creation nutter site:
"Scientists have no proof that life was not the result of an act of creation."—*Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe (1981), p. 19.
In its original context, however, something else entirely is revealed:
Scientists have no proof that life was not the result of an act of creation, but they are driven by the nature of their profession to seek explanations for the origin of life that lie within the boundaries of natural law. They ask themselves, "How did life arise out of inanimate matter? And what is the probability of that happening?" And to their chagrin they have no clear-cut answer, because chemists have never succeeded in reproducing nature's experiments on the creation of life out of nonliving matter. Scientists do not know how that happened, and, furthermore, they do not know the chance of its happening. Perhaps the chance is very small, and the appearance of life on a planet is an event of miraculously low probability. Perhaps life on the earth is unique in this Universe. No scientific evidence precludes that possibility.
But while scientists must accept the possibility that life may be an improbable event, they have some tentative reasons for thinking that its appearance on earthlike planets is, in fact, fairly commonplace. These reasons do not constitute proof, but they are suggestive. Laboratory experiments show that certain molecules, which are the building blocks of living matter, are formed in great abundance under conditions resembling those on the earth four billion years ago, when it was a young planet. Furthermore, those molecular building blocks of life appear in living organisms today in just about the same relative amounts with which they appear in the laboratory experiments. It is as if nature, in fashioning the first forms of life, used the ingredients at hand and in just the proportions in which they were present.
As anyone can plainly see, the context provides something entirely different.
I've seen the same sort of tactics used on creationist nutters websites and blogs for years. Over a year ago, I was on Dembski's weblog where there exist this passage:
Peter Ward said:
“The seemingly sudden appearance of skeletonized life has been one of the most perplexing puzzles of the fossil record. How is it that animals as complex as trilobites and brachiopods could spring forth so suddenly, completely formed, without a trace of their ancestors in the underlying strata? If ever there was evidence suggesting Divine Creation, surely the Precambrian and Cambrian transition, known from numerous localities across the face of the earth, is it.”
— Peter Douglas Ward, On Methuselah’s Trail: Living Fossils and the Great Extinctions (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1992), 29.
But let's use some logic based solely on th passage above: why is Ward not a creationist if he wrote what he did on page 29? What are the significances of the usage of the bolded words above, "seemingly," "how is it," and "if?"
Could it be that Ward is using a literary technique to set the reader up for an eventual explanation? Could it be that, as Ward tells the story of how earlier scientists viewed the Cambrian explosion, he is progressing toward a conclusion that provides a response to this "seeming" contradiction?
As it happened, I had a copy of
On Methuselah's Trail, which I picked up for $5.98 at Half-Price Books. Turning to page 36 we find:
Peter Ward said:
Intensive searching of strata immediately underlying the well-known basal Cambrian deposits in the years between 1950 and 1980 showed that the larger skeletonized fossils (such as the trilobites and brachiopods) that supposedly appeared so suddenly were in fact preceded by skeletonized forms so small as to be easily overlooked by the pioneering geologists. [...]The long-accepted theory of the sudden appearance of skeletal metazoans at the base of the Cambrian was incorrect: the basal Cambrian boundary marked only the first appearance of relatively large skeleton-bearing forms, such as the brachipods and trilobites, rather than the first appearance of skeletonized metazoans. Darwin would have been satisfied. The fossil record bore out his conviction that the trilobites and brachipods appeared only after a long period of evolution of ancestral forms.
If you want to see a creationist dumb-ass at work,
visit his own page and see the very quote-mined deception I've outlined above. This is the only tactic that creationist nutters can resort to in order to give their superstitions any sense of being credible: deception.
Their nutty ideas don't stand on their own merits, so they quote-mine
legitimate sources and other nutters until they can amass what appears to be a large body of dissent. The reality is almost *no* real scientists give any credibility to the notion that anything but evolution was at work. There is literally tons and tons of evidence. The opposing hypotheses are complete rubbish and unfounded with not a shred of actual evidence to support them.