It's not just a crappy new Korn song

Let me start out by saying I think evolution is the general cause of species differenciation, etc., etc. I like evolution, it's got a nice logic to it, it's a neat idea that might not appear naturally but once you understand it you're like duh! People inherit traits from their parents. Some traits are more likely to get people laid than others. Those traits are passed on in a larger number. Over time those traits become dominant among the species. Given long enough time and enough traits, you have a completely new species. Now beyond that basic theory of evolution there's a lot of fine tuning. One of the main complaints of the creationist crowd is that there is too much diversity to be explained by slow evolution. But on that matter, Stephen Jay Gould, gives some good explanation with his refinements of the theory and there are plenty of other refinements which while not completing a perfect account of everything in the world gives a pretty reasonable account of much of biological history. Sure there are questions still to be resolved, but they aren't ones that are that beyond our capacity. Well, that is excluding the really big questions like the ultimate why, and some of the most deep hows. But evolution works pretty good.

Creationism actually is pretty dangerous to religion as it fulfills all the criticism of the anti-religious that religion is just for filling up the blank spaces in science. That is not the case, but Creationists play into the stereotypes. Religion actually has several important purposes, greatest of which, is offering the ultimate whys for doing things, or at least some of the penaultimate whys (that depends on what you define as religion and if you put as a why the reason for choosing a particular religion and your reasons for choosing, of course with perhaps the ultimate ulimate why, reason is perhaps unable to suffice). One of the alleged replacements for this however, is the idea of evolutionary morality, that evolution has given us enough morality. I have some serious flaws with this. First of all, I'm a little skeptical about some of morality preached by religion. But more importantly, evolution offers no real reason to follow it. Evolution offers a course of action, but we can always refuse it, afterall some specimens have to fail the evolutionary test for there to be any change in the species.