Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

Natural selection is not evolution.

Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.

I think the most significant aspect of DNA is the support it gives to evolution by natural selection.

There is grandeur in this view of life … from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree.

Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.

The world becomes full of organisms that have what it takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is Darwinism.

[I]t seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye… It’s no wonder ‘the’ eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom… It is a geological blink.

After Darwin, God’s role changes from being the designer of all creatures, great and small, to being the designer of the laws of nature, from which natural selection can unfold, to being just perhaps the chooser of the laws.