God Doesn't Play Dice With the Universe

The most puzzling thing to me about the evolution vs. "intelligent design" conflict is why there has to be any conflict at all. It seems totally logical that an all-powerful creator, if there is such a thing, might easily have put into motion the evolutionary process beginning with a bit of carbon and some water, or whatever. Likewise, the faith vs. science battle need not be. Albert Einstein was deeply religous. He spent the latter half of his life searching for what he called the Unified Field Theory, a single explanation that he was convinced lay behind everything that happened in the universe, from the behavior of quarks to the strange actions of neutrinos. To prove its existence, he felt, would be tantamount to proof of God's existence. And now recently unearthed letters written by Newton, arguably the greatest scientist of all time, show him too to have been extremely religious. The man who discovered the force of gravity also, it seems, pinpointed the time that the Almighty would destroy the earth at around 2060. I hope I didn't ruin your breakfast.