Evolution and intelligent design.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: I don't see why intelligent design and scientific evolution should be in conflict with one another. They need one another for their survival. I have been involved for more than fifty years in the academic study of religions and so far have not found any primitive or modern one that cannot be studied as a distillation of order from a not particularly orderly existence.

All spirits, totems, deities, symbols or concepts of surviving religions promote, project or sum up order through representing wholeness or integration of one kind or another. They do this through maximising commitment to, retracing the grooves of, and dramatising conflicts with, that order.

Isn't this essentially what evolution is all about? Doesn't a constant, dynamic, moving, balance or equilibrium make for wholeness (integration) and breakdown of that wholeness (differentiation, adaptation)?

To me the genius of our Western civilisation is that it never allowed integration and sacralisation of order or its opposite, adaptation and secularisation of order, to get out of hand. Too much sacralisation and calcification is as fatal (the Aztec empire) as too much secularisation and scepticism (Ancient Greece).

Intelligent design stresses the obvious, necessary and admirable order in both our physical and social existence. Evolution stresses the equally obvious, necessary and admirable adaptation side of that same existence. Synthesis is as necessary as analysis. Wholeness (order and salvation for instance in Judaism, Christianity, Islam) is as real as breakdown ...