Bill, Perfectly stated, much better than I could have formulated the very same thoughts in my head, so thank you! Don, while I may be the first to agree with you that [I believe] there is a Creator behind all of this, nobody has to abandon that belief when it comes to evolutionary science. What do we replace it with, hocus pocus? Is it more plausible to picture God waving a magic wand, or sprinkling a lump of clay with pixie dust, than the possible idea that (s)he set in motion the complex algorithm of evolutionary creation? But all that aside, I whole-heartedly agree with Mr. Fienberg's assessment of the problem; religious belief has NO place in a science textbook. Don, I think you missed Rick's point completely -- gaps in our knowledge on ANY topic do not call for God to jump in as the filler. As he so aptly stated in his article, "If God exists only in the gaps, then God is diminished, rather than glorified, with each new discovery -- hardly satisfying for people of faith." Amen to that! Science is all about building models to explain the data we find, and of course it's ALL theory -- we still often wildly conjecture about the actual structure of atomic and sub-atomic particles, since we cannot directly observe them yet. But our models seem to fit the data, usually quite well and quite predictably, until we discover something new that requires us to refine the model. Newtonian Physics was "fact" for a long long time, until we realized that it wasn't quite able to explain all the things that we observed, and so the model was refined, enlarged, to include relativity and quantum mechanics, and... There is overwhelming evidence to support an evolutionary model across virtually every scientific discipline, from geology to every facet of biology to genetics (we now know, many decades after Darwin, that we share 98% of our DNA with Chimps for example) to chemistry to physics, sociology and the behavioral sciences to anthropology, etc. And mutational evolution IS an observed fact; as a microbiologist explained to me recently, it's one of the reasons we are losing the war against microbes (AIDS, etc.) -- they are mutating so quickly we can't keep up with them in our search to find drug therapies to effectively combat them. I do not see evolution as any kind of threat to my belief system, active High Priest that I am. If anything, the compelling beauty of evolutionary processes only strengthens it. I'm saddened to see so many folks still trying to vilify Darwin's work, when instead we should be grateful for his brilliant insight so long ago... My 2 cents, Rich __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com