On his blog View from the Right (added to blogroll), conservative Christian blogger Larry Auster summarises his views about evolution. Auster’s views and my own evolved independently, but on the following five points our views converge.
The truly scientific position (i.e. the honest recognition of the difference between what we know and what we don’t know) is that we DO NOT KNOW how new life forms came into existence. We know that various forms preceded or succeeded others, but we do not know how new forms came into being. It is a mystery.
Many Darwinians (not all) believe in Darwinian theory, not because they have any real interest in or knowledge of it, but because it abolishes God and validates a view of man as wholly material and a form of society based on nothing but supplying the material needs of man.
Their belief is correct. It is indeed the case that Darwinism precludes God from playing any role in the evolution of life (as well as any role in the conduct of human affairs). Despite the many people who want to believe in both Darwinism and in a divine ordering of life and the universe, they are mutually exclusive principles, as I have demonstrated repeatedly. See this discussion about whether God and Darwin are compatible. And here is a more concise statement by me on the question of whether God’s direction of evolution can be reconciled with Darwinian randomness:
From “The never-ending Darwinian two-step”:
I dealt with this as far as I was able in a recent blog entry. This “stochastic” idea is apparently that God could plant all the apparently random mutations in the mix which would still lead to fish and spiders and birds and chimpanzees. And I repeat, if the “randomness” was created by an intelligence to have certain results, then the process is not random, even if it appears random to us.
This idea is exceptionally hard for people to get, for two reasons: one, because it is so simple; and two, because they want so strongly to believe both in God and in Darwinism, and this idea precludes that. If the mutations occur randomly, then there’s no intelligent purpose behind them. If there is an intelligent purpose behind the mutations, then they are not random. Any definition of randomness that is used to get around this fundamental logical contradiction is not honest in my opinion.
If the explanation for the origin of species is either Darwinism or some intelligent purpose and direction, and if Darwinism and intelligent purpose are mutually exclusive, and if Darwinism is not and cannot be the explanation of the origin of species, then the origin of species must proceed from intelligent purpose, a divine intelligence of some kind.
The last point is an inescapable logical inference. It is not a scientific theory, it does not offer a how of evolution. It simply recognizes that given the impossibility that life and new species originated from random material events, the origin of life and the origin of species must come from a “higher” source, which remains beyond our ken. This insight means the acceptance of mystery, something that human intelligence is not able to penetrate.