Design in Nature - Evolution and the Christian

Finding Design in Nature, by Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna (free registration to the NYT required). As a Christian (and even before I was born again) I also can't accept that evolution is totally unplanned, unguided and essentially random. Apart from depressing, I think believing that would take more faith than the alternative!

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

I definitely believe that evolution is a valid scientific theory, with plenty of proof behind it, and also plenty of gaps in what we know and understand about it. I also believe that there is no way we, and most other forms of life on this planet, could have evolved entirely by random chance. God's amazing handiwork is everywhere if you only open your eyes and look around with an open mind and heart.

On an unrelated note, if all goes well the Shuttle launches today at 05:50:53 p.m. South African time. Oh, for a proper NASA TV feed...