Fred Hoyle

"Sir Fred Hoyle FRS (24 June 1915 - 20 August 2001) was an English astronomer noted primarily for the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and his often controversial stances on other cosmological and scientific matters - in particular his rejection of the "Big Bang" theory, a term originally coined by him on BBC radio. In addition to his work as an astronomer, Hoyle was a writer of science fiction, including a number of books co-written with his son Geoffrey Hoyle. Hoyle spent most of his working life at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge and served as its director for a number of years. He died in Bournemouth, England, after a series of strokes."(wiki)

Hoyle is famous for the quote: "The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein." But it is hard to pin down the origin of the quote. The Wikipedia article about it points to The Intelligent Universe. p. 17 and says that the Boeing 747 metaphor is reported in Nature, 294 (1981), p.10. The Wikipedia article is reluctant to give any credence to the junkyard tornado approach, betraying the strong bias toward strict Darwinian evolution and against any intelligent design scenario.

Strauss p18 comments on his "big bang" characterization.

"A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature."

Schaefer p31 reacts to this statement with "My own view is that .. these skeptics .. are unintentionally supporting the position put forth by St. Paul nearly two millennia earlier.." (Romans 1:20)

The Expanding Universe: The Nature of the Universe, Part V,

"Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves ... No wonder then that many people feel the need for some belief that gives them a sense of security, and no wonder that they become very angry with people like me who say that this is illusory."

Cited by Meyer on p130 of "Return of the God Hypothesis to make the point that Hoyle "started his scientific career as a staunch atheist who saw no evidence of design in the universe."

The Universe: Past and Present Reflections

F. Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space, 1981

"It is ironic that the scientific facts throw Darwin out, but leave William Paley, a figure of fun to the scientific world for more than a century, still in the tournament with a chance of being the ultimate winner... Indeed, such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific."p130.

"The enormous information content of even the simplest living systems... cannot in our view be generated by what are often called 'natural' processes... There is no way in which we can expect to avoid the need for information, no way in which we can simply get by with a bigger and better organic soup, as we ourselves hoped might be possible... The correct position we think is... an intelligence, which designed the biochemicals and gave rise to the origin of carbonaceous life... This is tantamount to arguing that carbonaceous life was invented by noncarbonaceous intelligence."

"the intelligence which assembled the enzymes did not itself contain them ... which by no means need be God, however." p139.

Evolution from Space

"Once we see that life is cosmic it is sensible to suppose that intelligence is cosmic. Now problems of order, such as the sequences of amino acids in the chains which constitute the enzymes and other proteins, are precisely the problems that become easy once a directed intelligence enters the picture... So if one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure of order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of in pondering this issue over quite a long time seems to me to have anything like as high a possibility of being true."

Mathematics of Evolution, 1999

"The Darwinian theory is wrong and the continued adherence to it is an impediment to discovering the correct evolutionary theory."

New Scientist, November 1981

"Imagine 10⁵⁰ blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik's cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have a chance of arriving by random shuffling, of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order."

The Intelligent Universe

"A generation or more ago a profound disservice was done to popular thought by the notion that a horde of monkeys thumping away on typewriters could eventually arrive at the plays of Shakespeare. The idea is wrong, so wrong that one has to wonder how it came to be broadcast so widely. The answer I think is that scientists wanted to believe that anything at all, even the origin of life could happen by chance, if only chance operated on a big enough time scale." p 1
Cited by Neil Thomas, "Taking Leave of Darwin", p74.

"It is ironic that the scientific facts throw Darwin out, but leave William Paley, a figure of fun to the scientific world for more than a century, still in the tournament with a chance of being the ultimate winner... Indeed, such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific."p12 (This quote is also attributed to the article with Wickramasinghe above. May not be exactly the same.)
Cited by Neil Thomas, "Taking Leave of Darwin", p60.

So why do biologists indulge in unsubstantiated fantasies in order to deny what is so patently obvious, that the 200,000 amino acid chains, and hence life, did not appear by chance? The answer lies in a theory developed over a century ago which sought to explain the development of life as an inevitable product of the purely local natural processes. Its author, Charles Darwin, hesitated to challenge the Church's doctrine on the creation, and publicly at least did not trace the implications of his ideas back to their bearing on the origin of life. However, he privately suggested that life may have been produced in "some warm little pond," and to this day his followers have sought to explain the origin of terrestrial life in terms of a process of chemical evolution from the primordial soup. But, as we have seen, this simply does not fit the facts." p23
Cited by Neil Thomas, "Taking Leave of Darwin", p59.

"Such properties seem to run through the fabric of the natural world like a happy thread of coincidences. But there are so many odd coincidences essential to life that some explanation seems required to account for them. " p220
Cited by Strauss in "The Creator Revealed", p39