Here's what I wrote:
The word "evolution" is very slippery. It means different things in different contexts. When people talk about evolution in the sense of being an impediment to belief in God they're usually talking about Darwin's theory (or what's actually called Neo-Darwinian evolution).
According to this theory, natural processes, primarily genetic mutation and natural selection, have produced from a single primitive cell all the diversity of plants, animals and protists that we see in today's world.
Some people believe this is what happened but that God somehow guided the process. Others believe the process had no need for God.
There's a whole spectrum of views on this topic from special creationists who believe that God created all the basic kinds (generally at the level of class or family) of organisms in seven days as recorded in Genesis to theistic evolutionists who believe that God created the laws that led to life and subsequent evolution, but that the evolutionary process happened independently of God, to naturalistic (Darwinian) evolutionists who believe God, if He exists, played no role at all in the development of life (The word "naturalism" in this context refers to the belief that nature is all there is. There's no supernatural God, or if there is He doesn't interfere in the universe. Naturalism is essentially a synonym for atheism.).
The view that I identify with is called Intelligent Design. This view says that however the universe and life came to be, however long ago it happened, it was not a solely naturalistic process. It was guided by an intelligent agent, and that there's evidence of the activity of this agent throughout both the physical universe (watch this short video on water, for example) as well as the realm of living things (the biosphere).
There are lots of problems with naturalistic evolution (NE). It has great difficulty explaining things like the evolution of butterfly metamorphosis, the evolution of beauty, the development of language in humans, the origin of consciousness, the evolution of enucleation in red blood cells, the evolution of sexual reproduction from asexual reproduction, the evolution of memory, the evolution of irreducibly complex biological machines within the cell, and much more.
But the biggest problem NE has is with the origin of life (OOL) itself. Until there is a living, reproducing cell there can be no genetic mutations and thus no natural selection. So, how did that first cell arise, complete with the molecular machinery - DNA, RNA and a suite of about 100 proteins - necessary for the cell to make copies of itself?
This has proven to be an intractable problem. Here's just one part of the problem: In order for DNA to make the proteins necessary for the functioning of the cell it needs the help of those proteins, but those proteins first must be made by the DNA which needs the help of the proteins before it can make them. No one has ever been able to solve this problem of how the DNA could make those proteins without those proteins yet being in existence.
That's just one problem with the OOL. Another problem is that it's extraordinarily improbable that a useful protein could be assembled by a random series of amino acids. If you'd like to see what I mean by this check out this post and video on Viewpoint.
The biggest problem for any naturalistic explanation of the OOL, though, is this: Proteins and DNA are information-rich. That is, they're like a code or letters or words in a paragraph. They contain and convey information, but nowhere in the universe do we ever find information that has not been produced by a mind.
Blind, purposeless natural processes cannot produce information. If barrels-full of scrabble letters were poured out on a gym floor at a rate of a million barrels per second for a billion years you'd never get one of the barrels to produce the text of this post or the first chapter of War and Peace.
We always attribute the information in books, or in a computer program, or anywhere else we find it, to a mind.
Well, even the most primitive cell contains an entire library of information, so where did that information come from?
It's much more reasonable, it seems to me, to believe that the information contained in the cell was produced by a mind than that it's the random, accidental product of blind nature. Nature is simply incapable of producing information of any significant level of complexity.
And, taking it one step further, any mind capable of producing the incredibly complex organisms we see in our world must be unimaginably intelligent and inconceivably powerful. In other words, it must be very much like the traditional concept of God.
