David Klinghoffer has an interesting article entitled Darwin’s Jews in the latest Jewish Week. Here are some insightful exceprts:

A sophisticated debate about Darwinian evolution is going on at the topmost levels of the Catholic Church. In the Jewish community, however, the discussion remains mostly primitive and ill informed. Surely this embarrassing state of affairs can be corrected, and I have a suggestion.

In a nutshell, the debate is over whether evolution was guided or not. Intelligent Design, or ID, asks if a purely material and unguided mechanism like Darwin’s can explain the course of life’s history, including things like the micro-machinery in every cell and the sudden infusion of genetic information in the Earth’s ancient seas 530 million years ago, the famous Cambrian explosion.

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In the Jewish community, with a few notable exceptions, no comparable debate is going on. Too many Jews want to be on what they consider the prestige side of the controversy but neglect to look beyond the misleading headlines.

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In reality, ID theorists would hardly deny that the forms which complex life takes have changed or evolved over hundreds of millions of years. Rather, ID points to positive evidence of a designer’s guiding hand in that long history. More than 475 scientists, at places like Yale, MIT, Rice and the Smithsonian Institution, have affirmed in a signed statement that they doubt the power of Darwin’s selection/mutation mechanism to produce the splendor of life all around us. The Discovery Institute, where I work and which has led the ID movement, compiled the list of Darwin doubters. This is far from biblical literalism.

I’m one of those creationists who also accept that evolution is a natural part of God’s creation. I don’t believe though that Darwinism explains everything. I suspect that what we see now has been fully guided by God’s hand, either through direct intervention or through rules that he established. The standard argument from the hardcore Darwinists is that no real scientist would ever question Darwinism. Unfortunately for them, there are plenty of real, highly educated, highly respected scientists who don’t doubt that life changes and evolves, but who also don’t swallow the Darwinism theory hook, line, and sinker.