response log:
8/18 phone William Hurdlaw, "great column"
8/18 fax letter, clergy, life without a Creator not worth living
8/18 phone John Russo, wanting equal time

This column is not intended for believers in creationism, and they shouldn't read it.
I probably don't have to worry that any of them will. As soon as they figure out that I intend to praise a book titled "Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life" they'll be rushing off to their word processors to write letters setting me straight.
Don't you think it would be fair to expect people who reject the central thesis of modern science to get along without its benefits as well? But no such prohibition would be enforceable, and anyway, I wouldn't want to give the impression that charity toward those who don't share one's views is exclusively a religious virtue.
The author of "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" is Daniel C. Dennett, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University, and don't allow any preconceptions you may have about dry-as-dust philosophical jargon to deprive you of the pleasure of reading him. His specialty is illuminating subtle ideas with everyday metaphors and charming and funny thought-experiments. The light is as bright as day, and cunningly contrived so the reader is lulled into seeing exactly what Dennett intends him to see, but figuring out how he's done it is the best part of the fun.
Charles Darwin's idea is the theory of evolution, and Dennett's metaphor is that evolution resembles a series of cranes — the construction kind, not the bird kind. Just as a little crane at a building site may be used to make a bigger one, evolution by natural selection works by building more complex and successful organisms out of the structures that already exist.
The process is profligate, producing and discarding innumerable variants for every one that survives because it was luckily better at something it needed for survival than its slightly different close relatives. But given world enough and time, it produces creatures exquisitely adapted to their environment. Design, with no designer needed.
The dangerous part of Darwin's idea — dangerous, at least, to those who wish to believe in a designer — is that cranes are enough. There is no need for the kind of miraculous or extraordinary interventions Dennett calls skyhooks.
It is possible, obviously, to reject the whole business out of hand, as many devout Christians. There is, literally, no arguing with such people. The axiom "Everything that disagrees with the Bible is wrong" is logically unassailable.
But it's not much use. If you want answers in your life to pesky questions like why South America fits so neatly into Africa but California has no such match on the other side of the Pacific, or why diabetics can live on the substance produced by certain bacteria that have bits of human protein inserted, or what the Hubbell telescope is seeing, you need a certain level of science.
And once you have it, Dennett is saying, you don't need anything more to explain life, the universe and everything.
Not even in principle would it be possible to construct a different theory of science that leaves evolution out and everything else useful in. The fraction of practicing scientists who would see any point in such an exercise is vanishingly small, and no one except practicing scientists could plausibly try.
"To put it bluntly but fairly," Dennett writes, "anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant — inexcusably ignorant in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write."
He is appalled, as I am, that polls show 70 percent of Americans think "creation science" should be taught in the schools alongside evolution. They are not comparable. Creation science is a parody of science, not an example of it, and that is why it does not belong in schools. Certain religious people believe in it, but that's not grounds for exclusion. Certain religious people believe in telling the truth, too, and that should be taught in schools, although with the so-called "value neutral" curricula it usually isn't.
I don't mind as much as Dennett does, though, the idea that parents should be able to pull their children out of biology classes for reasons of conscience. A large fraction of adult Americans are so close to functionally illiterate that they can't read a bus schedule or fill out a job application. Whether someone can explain punctuated equilibrium adequately is not a qualification for most jobs.
Most of such children will grow up to be perfectly functional adults, just as pacifists can live with perfect safely in a well- defended country, just as long as there aren't too many of them.
No doubt someone will want to tell me that evolution is as much a matter of faith as belief in God. As much, perhaps, but not the same kind. I have faith in the theory of evolution in the same prosaic and uncontroversial manner that I have faith in elevators. I walk into a little box suspended over a thousand feet of nothing sublimely confident that I will walk out at the bottom in one piece, not squashed into pulp. Elevators are engineered to do exactly that.
Evolution is a form of engineering, too, but absent a purposeful engineer. The theory of evolution, however, does have engineers — hundreds of thousands of scientists who have constructed it over the century and a half since Darwin to do precisely what it does, which is to explain a huge number and variety of interesting phenomena in a consistent and useful way.
As to what meaning life has in the light of this belief, Dennett has a lot to say about that too. But if you have read this far, you'll enjoy more reading that for yourself.