Peter, you have hit on precisely what troubles me about Darwin's Theory. I think it's partly right. I think it's probably right as far as it goes, but that it simply doesn't go far enough. I do not think evolution is entirely or solely about survival issues (natural selection being based on survival issues), I think it's about a number of things and that survivability of a lifeform is just one of them. I think there are other ideals of perfection embodied in Nature as well as the prosaic issues of survival.

I think it's a reflection of a highly intelligent process which is concerned about considerably more than mere survival.

If you convince humans that they are products of mere "natural selection", you have, in effect, robbed them of believing in any higher purpose. You might as well rob them of their hearts and their souls. You might as well rob them of all poetry and nobility and beauty and romance. You might as well convince them they are no more valuable than dirt, and that nothing they do ultimately matters. It's unthinkable to me to do that to people. (and I don't think for a moment that Darwin intended to do that, by the way, but I think the widespread exclusive adoption of his theory has unwittingly helped to do that subliminally to modern humans) We have lost much of our idealism in the modern age, and we have produced horrible things which would have been unthinkable not too long ago.   As with Communist theory, it doesn't bode well for the psychology of a people when you succeed in convincing them that man lives "by bread alone" and that their place in life is just a meaningless end result of nothing else than a natural survival process.

You have taken something away from people when you do that...something noble, something beautiful. You don't need a concept of a "God" to have that something in your life, but you need to believe that your life is about higher ideals of some kind, not just survival.