GOD fundamentalists believe to be the age of the universe But a non-literal interpretation of Genesis was adopted long ago by theologians as orthodox as St Augustine, and many Christians today are content to accept that the earth may have existed for billions of years It is more difficult to reconcile an acceptance of Darwinism with belief in original sin If the struggle for existence had been going on for aeons before humans evolved, it is impossible to accept that it was man’s first disobedience and the fruit of the forbidden tree that brought death into the world On the other hand, it is wrong to suggest, as is often done, that Darwin disproved the existence of God For all Darwin showed, the whole machinery of natural selection may have been part of a creator’s design for the universe After all, belief that we humans are God’s creatures has never been regarded as incompatible with our being the children of our parents; it is no more incompatible with us being, on both sides, descended from the ancestors of the apes At most, Darwin disposed of one argument for the existence of God: namely, the argument that the adaptation of organisms to their environment exhibits the handiwork of a benevolent creator But even that is to overstate the case The only argument refuted by Darwin would be one that said: wherever there is adaptation to environment we must see the immediate activity of an intelligent being But the old argument from design did not claim this; and indeed it was an essential step in the argument that lower animals and natural agents did not have minds The argument was only that the ultimate explanation of such adaptation must be found in intelligence; and if the argument was ever sound, then the success of Darwinism merely inserts an extra step between the phenomena to be explained and their ultimate explanation Darwinism leaves much to be explained The origin of individual species from earlier species may be explained by the mechanisms of evolutionary pressure and selection But these mechanisms cannot be used to explain the origin of species as such For one of the starting points of explanation by natural selection is the existence of true breeding populations, namely species Many Darwinians claim that the origin and structure of the world and the emergence of human life and human institutions are already fully explained by science, so that no room is left for postulating the existence of activity of any non-natural agent Darwin himself was more cautious Though he believed that it was not necessary, in order to account for 301