I sure don't think Watchtower writers have read his books, although they sure quote him as you observe. The following is taken from another thread on Blood, the Watchtower and Deceit, which I've also moved up.
::Let me offer another example of the use of selective quotations. For many, many years the Society has quoted famed British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle out of context. They have portrayed him as against evolution and as a creationist. I’ll be charitable and say that writer after writer has trotted out the same stuff for years, without checking. You can find the citations for yourself, so I’ll just supply Hoyle’s.
Take a look at the dust jacket of his book "The Intelligent Universe" which speaks for itself: "The **Darwinian** theory of evolution is shown to be plainly wrong. Life has evolved [!!!] because biological components of cosmic origin have been progressively assembled here on Earth. These components have arrived from outside, borne in from the cosmos on comets" ... "The key to understanding evolution is the virus. The viruses responsible for evolution and the viruses responsible for diseases are very similar." (Published first in 1983 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York.)
Note that it is Darwinism and not evolution that Sir Fred takes issue with. He believes that our planet is an "assembly station" that was "seeded" from outer space and that life did indeed evolve, just not from inanimate matter. Please also note that his thesis is not buried somewhere in his books; they are the heart and soul of his clearly written argument.
It is difficult to believe that the Society’s writers have never read an entire publication by Sir Fred or more than a line or two. If they have not, their misrepresentations are indefensible. If they have read his books, they are obviously suppressing or misrepresenting what the distinguished astronomer really espouses, because it is quite impossible to read his books without understanding what he clearly articulates.
In using this and similar books in the past, perhaps the Society’s writer looked only at the FRONT of the book’s dust jacket, whose subtitle is "A New View of Creation and Evolution," and did not look at the BACK, on which there are a picture of the astronomer and in large print the words, "We have DESCENDED FROM LIFE SEEDED FROM THE DEPTHS OF SPACE." (Caps mine.)
On page 41 of the Creator book under the heading "A Deliberate Intellectual Act" in another, longer quotation we read (finally after all these years) the all-but-buried clause referring to Hoyle, "even espousing that life on earth arrived from outer space," while the paragraph ends by quoting him that "it seemed better to suppose that the origin of life was a deliberate intellectual act." (You are encouraged to read the entire page for yourself.)
Sounds great, he believes in God and creation, right? Once again the sentences are taken out of context, so that the reader will infer what the author does not imply. The reader readily concludes that a toweringly important scientist believes what JWs believe.
Read for yourself Hoyle’s discussions about cosmic intelligences superior to ours. And what does he actually believe about creation?
In his own words: "It makes little difference whether the Universe was created in 4004 BC as Archbishop Ussher asserted, or 10,000,000 years ago, if indeed there ever was a creation, which as we have seen there are plenty of reasons to doubt." [!]
Hoyle winds up his argument by noting: "Because the correct logical procedure is to build upwards from precisely formed subroutines, we on the Earth had to evolve [!] from a seemingly elementary starting point. Yet so powerful was the onward surge, so urgent the climb up the great mountain, that on Earth a creature at last arose with an inkling in its mind of what it really was, a whisper of its identity: We are the intelligence that preceded us in its new material representation—or rather, we are the re-emergence of that intelligence, the latest embodiment of its struggle for survival." (Pp. 238, 239.)
You be the judge: Does Sir Fred Hoyle believe what the Society would have you think? Is the basic belief of Sir Fred Hoyle supportive of the Society’s position? Absolutely not. That hasn’t stopped them from misquoting him for years.
A final thought: When teaching at Gilead School, Bert Schroeder (now an aged and frail member of the GB) used to cite the rule "falsus in uno, falsus in toto" as a standard to determine trustworthiness—"untrue in one, untrue in all."
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I highly recommend Metatron's posts on Mainstreaming vs. Reform if you haven't already read them. Explains much.
Maximus
