Welcome to the Eric Mettaxas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas.

Hey, folks, continuing our conversation with Neil Thomas.

The book is taking leave of Darwin.

Neil, the point I was just making that I want your response to is that there are people

that still feel that they cannot, God forbid, take leave of Darwin, to quote the title of your book.

They have to somehow say that it is natural selection via random mutation and natural

processes that produced the panoply of creation. And what folks like Stephen Meyer and Michael

B. He say is no, the evidence says that theory has to be set aside. And it seems to me that

you too say that theory has to be set aside. We cannot use Darwin's theory of natural

selection to account for how things are the way they are. That's really what you have come to see.

So what is some of the evidence for that?

In other words, when you say that that's no longer possible,

what is it that you've seen in the fossil record

that makes you say we can no longer have natural selection as our thesis?

Well, I mean, I think that natural selection is not what the Victorians would have understood by a true Vera Kausa, a true reasoning.

It is not a mechanism.

It is a statistical observation on what typically

happens with regard to the survival of the fittest and so on. It has nothing to say about

innovation or the creation of new body parts or body types or body forms and so on.

And I do feel that those people who try and have the best of both worlds

talking in terms of both divine origin plus Darwin are, as I say,

they're trimming and equivocating in a way that I think was first pointed out by a chap called Richard Hofstadter back in 1944 in the first meditation on the

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