Following are a series of quotes that bear on the Darwinian/Intelligent Design controversy.
First is University of Delaware physicist Stephen Barr's literary allusion which illustrates why Divine creation and evolution are not necessarily incompatible:
Did this insect evolve or is it created by God? To ask that is as silly as to ask whether Polonious died because Hamlet stabbed him or because Shakespeare wrote the play that way.
----------------
Jonathan Wells is officially an IDer and personally a creationist. He's writing on the topic Why Darwinism is Doomed, and makes an important distinction which writers on this subject seem almost perversely unable to grasp:
The issue here is not "evolution" - a broad term that can mean simply change within existing species (which no one doubts). The issue is Darwinism - which claims that all living things are descended from a common ancestor, modified by natural selection acting on random genetic mutations.
The truth is Darwinism is not a scientific theory, but a materialistic creation myth masquerading as science. It is first and foremost a weapon against religion - especially traditional Christianity. Evidence is brought in afterwards, as window dressing.
This is becoming increasingly obvious to the American people, who are not the ignorant backwoods religious dogmatists that Darwinists make them out to be. Darwinists insult the intelligence of American taxpayers and at the same time depend on them for support. This is an inherently unstable situation, and it cannot last.
If I were a Darwinist, I would be afraid. Very afraid.
I would add to what Wells says about Darwinism that the trait which makes it anathema to many theists is not that it is a form of evolution but that it insists that only physical forces were involved in the emergence of life and all of life's diversity. In other words Darwinists hold that intelligence is irrelevant to the existence of the cosmos and the biosphere. This strikes many people as implausible to the point of incredulity.
-----------------
Jonathan Wells also notes that it is a myth, and a false one at that, that biologists have actually witnessed one species evolving into another:
So except for polyploidy in plants, which is not what Darwin's theory needs, there are no observed instances of the origin of species. As evolutionary biologists Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote in 2002: "Speciation, whether in the remote Galapagos, in the laboratory cages of the drosophilosophers, or in the crowded sediments of the paleontologists, still has never been directly traced." Evolution's smoking gun is still missing.
From: Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design , p. 55, quoting Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of Species (New York: Basic Books, p. 32).
-------------------
Richard Dawkins is a militantly atheistic Darwinian who makes a startling admission in an essay which first appeared here, but which subsequently disappeared. Speculation has it that Dawkins was pressured to take it down by fellow Darwinians because his admission makes it very difficult for them to maintain the twin fictions that Intelligent Design is religion and that it can't be science because it can't be tested:
You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god would be a completely different kind of universe from one without, and it would be a scientific difference. God could clinch the matter in his favour at any moment by staging a spectacular demonstration of his powers, one that would satisfy the exacting standards of science.
I wonder if the Big Bang is spectacular enough to qualify.
