Steve Shaw says: ...As for beauty, my take on the role of evolution is that it has proceeded for four billion years (a terrifying fact not understood at all by people of religion) from the very origin of life to the complexity and diversity of life on earth that we're privileged to be a part of. From that diversity comes the beauty, and the way I see beauty is that it is the natural product, the synergy if you like, of form and function. Look at a flower close up. You can either ditch your mighty intellect and see God, or you can marvel at the billions of years of evolution that have not only made that flower so perfectly fit for purpose but have also made it look so aesthetically pleasing that the greatest artists that have ever lived can hardly do it justice in spite of its simplicity. A curious, wide-eyed seven-year-old sees it more perfectly, more unaffectedly, than even a Michelangelo or a Constable, and those blokes would, I'm creating, have agreed with me there. That's what I call beauty. And, by the way, you can't do both. They are mutually exclusive, despite the pleadings of the softly-softly religious.

Can't quite figure out how it's impossible to see both God and the marvels of evolution. It seems to me that if we are able to look at something from a variety of perspectives, including the perspective of various schools of philosophic and religious thought, that our appreciation should be broader.

If we rule out any school of thought, we limit our perspective.

I also can't figure out why it might be that people of religion cannot appreciate evolution, for however long it has gone on.

And what things are mutually exclusive?

And who are these "softly-softly religious"? I take it that Mr. Shaw posits that the only true religion is fundamentalism, since he cannot accept the idea that religious people may be every bit as intellectually competent as he believes himself to be.

There's an interesting parallel between Mr. Shaw's absolutism, and that of religious fundamentalists. Both think that their own perspective is the only one that can possibly be valid. Rather limited and narcissistic, dontchathink?

-Joe-