Because TeeJay and others have failed to read it, and because it has now become buried beneath the usual Deluge of Deranged Darwinist Dipsticks, I'm reposting an extract from the link Bernie provided to Robert Appleyard's excellent article in yesterday's _Sunday Times_. Sums up the current state of debate very nicely, I feel.
"This usually cold war has now entered a very hot phase. The militant atheists have been enraged by the fact that President George W Bush has said “intelligent design” is as likely an explanation as evolution. Meanwhile, intelligent design (ID) is being studied and developed in some respected universities.
The truth of what is going on here is complex yet vital. The average newspaper reader and television viewer in Britain has, thus far, had no chance of understanding why. The BBC, for instance, presents anything but the strictest neo-Darwinian orthodoxy as clear evidence of insanity.
Knots need to be unpicked. First, the world is purposefully designed. Sharks have teeth to capture their prey and trees have leaves to capture sunlight. In the absence of any competing hypothesis, it is rational to assume that an intelligence, God perhaps, is at work.
Enter Darwin. He said that, once a stable replicative process is established in nature, then errors will occur. A few beneficial errors will render replicators — organisms — better adapted and, therefore, better able to reproduce. Over billions of years, this simple process will lead to the variety of life we see around us today. Note that Darwin did not say how this system works nor how it began. He had no idea.
Since then, we have begun to understand how evolution works. DNA is the replicator at the heart of the system and errors in the transcription of this molecule result in mutations, most of which are harmful but some of which are beneficial. The combination of Darwinism and molecular biology has created the orthodoxy known as neo-Darwinism.
None of which has — or should have — the slightest consequence for religious belief. Indeed, to a Taoist, Hindu or Buddhist, Darwinism must appear irrelevant, trivial or obvious. Even a Christian shouldn’t really be bothered. Of course, Darwinism shows the Bible is not literally accurate if only because it requires the earth to be billions rather than thousands of years old — but treating biblical stories as metaphors, not literal truths, is a commonplace of Christian theology.
Darwinism did not, as we are sometimes told, “explain life”. What the theory explains is what happens once life, or at least replication, gets going. Darwin did not know how replication began and, contrary to what you may think, neither do we."
