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The question, "Can God and Darwinism coexist?", is absurd on its face. Even more absurd are the assumptions present in the phrasing of the question. Let's look at those for a minute.

First off, what God are we talking about here? We're talking about the Creator of the Universe, the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the One who has set down all the laws of Nature and who could turn them all upside-down in a nanosecond. Parted the Red Sea, brought water from a rock in the middle of a desert, raised His only Son from the dead, and is going to put us all through one hellacious nightmare in the final days (if you'll pardon the small pun)-we're really asking, here, whether He can co-exist with a supposedly human invention? Why is this even open for debate?

Now, secondly, this depends on whether God exists and, if so, whether He or She lives up to the description the Christians have given Him or Her. If not, well, we are aware that other deities have been worshiped all through human history and that a fair number of Them are still worshiped now, right? I am no great expert on world religions, although I suppose I know more than the average American, but I could swear I have never heard of any other religion's followers objecting to "Darwinism" the way some Christians do. Even Jews and Muslims, who purportedly worship the same God, don't make a lot of noise about this.

In a nutshell, though, what this question really says is that the Christian version of God literally exists and that furthermore there is a possibility He can't co-exist with some weird religion based on some nut named Darwin. This takes me to our next issue.

Science education in the United States being in the woeful state it is, let me state for the record that Charles Darwin did not invent evolution. In fact, scientists were already discussing the possibility of evolution before he ever made his voyage on the HMS Beagle. Still, there is nothing like hanging out on a remote island amongst dozens of weird animals with lots of time on one's hands to get one thinking about where it all came from. This is why Darwin wrote his famous book, and this is why he's vilified today. In fact, to hear people tell it, the theory of evolution began and ended with Darwin.

If only that were true.

As much a science geek as I was in childhood, even I somehow missed the salient points about evolution, how the theory was formulated, and that there are in fact multiple theories of evolution today. Natural selection seems

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