“Note the number of positive assertions made in the name of popular science, without the least pretence of scientific proof.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News July 12, 1930, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023) [and foretelling COVID, climate alarmism etc. with uncanny accuracy]
“Bishops demanded to know of Darwin’s defenders the precise details of their descent from gorillas; satirists delighted in portraying Darwin himself as an ape; Cope declared his belief that humanity had evolved from a lemur. Yet not all the debating society sallies, not all the cartoons of monkeys in frock coats, not all the theorizing about possible lines of human descent could entirely conceal what yawned behind them: an immense abyss of anxiety and doubt. Nervousness at the idea that humanity might have evolved from another species was not bred merely of a snobbery towards monkeys. Something much more was at stake. To believe that God had become man and suffered the death of a slave was to believe that there might be strength in weakness, and victory in defeat. Darwin’s theory, more radically than anything that previously had emerged from Christian civilization, challenged that assumption. Weakness was nothing to be valued. Jesus, by commending the meek and the poor over those better suited to the great struggle for survival that was existence, had set homo sapiens upon the downward path towards degeneration. For eighteen long centuries, the Christian conviction that all human life was sacred had been underpinned by one doctrine more than any other: that man and woman were created in God’s image. The divine was to be found as much in the pauper, the convict or the prostitute as it was in the gentleman with his private income and book-lined study.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“We must not suppose that the appearance of the world is the same today as it was before sin.”
Martin Luther, quoted in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [as part of a discussion of growing interest in geology from the 16th century on, including clergymen both arguing for a young earth and using fossils etc. to prove it was old].
His childhood faith gradually faded as he grew up. “Why, if God existed, had he allowed so many species to evolve, to flourish, and then utterly to disappear? Why, if he were merciful and good, had he permitted an asteroid to smash into the side of the planet, making the flesh on the bones of dinosaurs burst into flame, the Mesozoic seas to boil, and darkness to cover the face of the earth? I did not spend my whole time worrying about these questions; but sometimes, in the dead of night, I would. The hope offered by the Christian story, that there was an order and purpose to humanity’s existence, felt like something that had forever slipped my grasp. ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible,’ as the physicist Stephen Weinberg famously put it, ‘the more it also seems pointless.’”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“‘There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.’ Today, in the West, there are many who would agree with [the just-quoted Heinrich] Himmler that, for humanity to claim a special status for itself, to imagine itself as somehow superior to the rest of creation, is an unwarrantable conceit. Homo sapiens is just another species.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“Hi John,/ Is your email deliverability in good health?”
Start of email from Mailchimp Oct. 1, 2025 [prompting my retort "better than your syntax"]
“The first impulse of an enlightened person on hearing the proposal to broadcast the debates of Parliament is merely that it is one of the typical triumphs of modern science. It is telling us that everybody can listen to what nobody wants to hear.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 5, 1925, quoted in “Radio (and TV and Movies)” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #3 (Jan./Feb. 2025)
“It is psychologically impossible, when we hear real scientific statistics, not to think that they mean something. Generally they mean nothing. Sometimes they mean something that isn’t true.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Nov. 18, 1905, quoted in “Statistics” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)