Evolution does not equate to randomness, and belief in the overwhelming evidence for evolution does not make one an atheist.
“Evolution does not equate to randomness,”
If not Random, is “Evolution” then guided, regular and directed?
“...the overwhelming evidence for evolution”
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
Francis Crick, Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature
“[W]hile we already have a quite good understanding of how organisms adapt to the environment, much less is known about the mechanisms behind the origin of evolutionary novelties, a process that is arguably different from adaptation. Despite Darwin’s undeniable merits, explaining how the enormous complexity and diversity of living beings on our planet originated remains one of the greatest challenges of biology.” (Günter Theißen, “Saltational Evolution: Hopeful Monsters are Here to Stay,” Theory in Biosciences, Vol. 128: 43, 44 (2009) (internal citations omitted).)
“The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, [must] be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.” (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, (1859).)
-—.“A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.”
“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.” (Stephen Jay Gould, Paleobiology, Vol. 6(1), page 127 (1981).)
“Most of the animal groups that are represented in the fossil record first appear, ‘fully formed,’ and identifiable as to their phylum in the Cambrian some 550 million years ago...The fossil record is therefore of no help with respect to understanding the origin and early diversification of the various animal phyla.” (R.S.K. Barnes, P. Calow, and P.J.W. Olive, The Invertebrates: A New Synthesis, pages 9–10 (3rd ed., Blackwell Science Publications, 2001).)
“[W]e have a prior commitment … to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to … produce material explanations … Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” (Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” New York Review of Books, (January 9, 1997).)
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“belief in the overwhelming evidence for evolution does not make one an atheist.”
“Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.” (Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery, (New York: Basic Books, 1988).)
“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, page 1 (2nd ed., New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).)