I am anti-evolutionist when the evolutionists overreach and attempt to furnish their findings to the service of militant atheism; or when they use the power of state to influence what should be an open debate. There was a period when the shoe was on the other foot, and back then I would have had a greater sympathy for them.
I am anti-evolutionist when the evolutionists overreach and attempt to furnish their findings to the service of militant atheism; or when they use the power of state to influence what should be an open debate. There was a period when the shoe was on the other foot, and back then I would have had a greater sympathy for them.
I try to avoid militancy, at least in scientific matters. But I do think it's likely to be true that life on Earth in fact developed from what is usually taken to be non-living matter, and that the bewildering diversity that we see today in the biosphere is (in ways we still seem far from understanding) the result of random variation and mutation taking place over vast time periods within enormous numbers of remarkably ordered chemical structures (DNA and RNA, chiefly), which structures express themselves in types of organisms that the environment and its vicissitudes (that is, the occasional earthquake or fire or comet impact or meteor impact or change in climate or ...) then select for.
It doesn't seem to me, though, that it's a consequence of this view that there is no deity. Rather, the evolutionary approach—indeed, the natural science approach—is that we try to explain as much as we can without invoking non-physical causes. So it's a working hypothesis, rather than a conclusion to be drawn, that a deity (or some other consciously directing force) isn't required to explain the development of life on Earth. We take it as far as we can and see what happens.
Those who are currently interested in dismissing evolution studies entirely seem to me to be treating a baby as if it were an adult. The biosphere is so complicated that it seems to me safe to say that we're only just beginning to get a bit of understanding of it.