To stop beating around the bush: the reality which concerns you
is not my toe crushed by a falling brick. The reality which concerns
you is the sometime existence of the paleontological plants and animals,
long since extinct, the occurrence of which is inferred from fossils,
creatures whose life and death is thought to validate Darwin's theory
of origin of species by natural selection and the survival of the fittest.
I challange none of those observations; I challenge none of the conclusions.
My sole concern is to examine what these observations and conclusions
mean to me.

A second reality which concerns you is the interrelationship of the
structures observed and inferred from the observations, experimental
and otherwise, of molecular biologists. I agree that these structures
and their functions are of great immediate and practical consequence
with respect, for example to such issues as "genetic counseling",
and the manufacture of genetically modified plants, animals and
pharmaceuticals.

I consider myself fortunate to be in a position dispassionately
to consider the position and function in my intellectual universe
of these two realities the importance of which your endorsement
vouchsafes for me.

My initial preliminary observation is the qualitative difference
between these two realities. I discern no forseeable practical
consequence of the discovery of the paleontologic reality that
concerns us. I interpret its significance as a substitution of
randomness for voluntary determination, dispensing with the 
anthropomorphic agency hitherto deemed responsible for the
configuration of the (animate) world.

At the risk of straying too far afield, let me consider the meaning
of randomness as used in the context of genetic mutations. Here's
my very limited understanding. Please correct my errors. Exposure
to high frequency X-rays and gamma rays has been shown experimentally
to induce genetic mutations in laboratory animals. Similar radiation,
called "cosmic rays" have been shown to penetrate the atmosphere,
presumably generated by electromagnetic activity of distant stars.
It is thought that apparently spontaneous mutations are attributable
to such cosmic rays striking the germ cells of an animal. The mutations
hypothetically triggered by cosmic rays are anything but random. If
one determines the source of each cosmic ray its trajectory and its
collision with the target cell, the randomness of mutations is displaced
into the randomness of the electromagnetic activity of the stars,
and of course the randomness of this electromagnetic activity also
is apparent only, and vanishes with the explication of nuclear stellar
reactions. Admittedly tracing the chain of causality on so cosmic a
scale is a tall order. But let me remind you, once Eve persuaded
Adam to take a bite of the apple from the tree of knowledge, there's
no chain of causality too complex for me to trace. I have no further
patience with randomness. You go tell your fellow acolytes of Charles
Darwin to start doing their homework and to stop chattering about the
randomness of cosmic rays causing mutations; because if we admit
randomness as a causative principle, it's much less work and much
less controversy to postulate randomness at a much later stage of
genesis and say the contemporary diversity of species is a consequence
of random events, of random circumstances, of random processes.

Darwinism, as I understand it, remains crippled and haunted by its
conception in ideology. Its purpose, its intention was to purge
our understanding of the world as an expression of "will", heavenly
or otherwise, by substituting for will non-anthropomorphic causality.
But to no avail. Replacing the anthropomorphic will with randomness-
driven causality will never do, and for this reason: causality is
itself a mirror image of human action.

My point is that causation requires an intuitive nexus between cause
and effect akin to the intuitive nexus between "will" and "act".
A "random cause" is an oxymoron and entails an internal contradiction
which vitiates the meaning of any explanation that relies on it.
An event to which a random cause is assigned is an event whose cause
is indeterminate and undetermined, is likewise a random event:
an event which "just happens." As the "will" is the anticipation of
the act, so the "cause" entails the anticipation of the effect.

The consequence: mutations are random events. Random events might be
expressions of a will in two ways: a) determined in a manner not 
apparent to us, or b) determined to be just that: random.