Misleading Arguments

An argument, which I have heard from several sources now, is to "believe that evolution happened, and is indeed still happening, but who is to say that God didn't direct it? Erin 23 Oct 1998, 11:48:29. (Sorry, that last link has died; I don't know where it went.) This question was also raised to Bill Nye (the science guy) at the 1999 AAAS meeting.

There are at least two possibilities on closer inspection:

1. To believe this is to completely misunderstand the mechanism of evolution. That is, it denies that there is molecular DNA variation (caused by errors in copying from thermal noise, base tautomerization, UV crosslinking, environmental mutagens, transposons etc!) and selection amongst those variants by environmental factors.
2. Or, it would mean that (invisible??) God's hand is everywhere, breeding all species at all times. God is specifically killing off stupid people who don't wear seat belts? God is somehow causing the selection of bacteria that I transform in the lab? One out of 20 thousand bacteria will pick up a plasmid (ring of DNA). God picked them? There is no visible mechanism here and none is needed to explain the observed facts! (Do people really think that they were bred like dogs?)

While talking to a woman about to become a pastor, I was asked: "Well, ok, maybe one can explain living things by mathematics and evolution, but didn't God Create Mathematics?" This was elegantly answered "No" by the famous coding theorist and mathematician R. W. Hamming: http://www.mcs.net/~wcooper/Unreasonable2.html (a mirror), in particular: "The Postulates of Mathematics Were Not on the Stone Tablets that Moses Brought Down from Mt. Sinai." (The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics R. W. HAMMING The American Mathematical Monthly Volume 87 Number 2 February 1980)