ABSTRACT
About a century and a half ago Charles Darwin surprised the world with his remarkable new theory of evolution. Scientific skeptics, of course, decided long ago that the only reasonable option Darwin leaves the reader is that of a totally Godless universe. Darwin claimed that all forms of life descend from a common ancestor and that the wide array of living species can be accounted for by a process he called “natural selection.” Sacred traditions have held consistently that the cosmos is here for a reason, even though they may not have been able to specify clearly just what this “reason” might be. Updated evolutionary interpretations of life, language, behavior, morality, and even religion have lately been gaining unprecedented acceptance by natural scientists, philosophers, linguists, ethicists, social scientists, and, more recently, the medical community. .
