85

This well-known line sums up a popular explanation of evolution. Unfortunately for the idea of evolution, however, it doesn’t help because it contains a logical contradiction.

The phrase has been popular since Darwin’s time and has greatly helped the theory of evolution replace the idea of creationism in the popular mind. but the meaning of the word select contradicts the meaning of the word random. Select suggests intention, purpose, cause. It implies a selector. It implies Theism. Random is the exact opposite. One thing happens and then something else happens. No cause and effect. Two accidents. How then did the two words become such buddies when each one cancels out the other? How did the incompatible become compatible?

1. One reason is that the phrase sounds good. It looks scientifically impressive, and for the careless reader, it seems to refute the Genesis idea that God created the world. Now a lot of people in Darwin’s time wanted to refute a literal reading of Genesis, and this seemed to go in that direction. 
2. Some wanted to go further and argued that if science disproved Genesis, then it disproved God also. Some take that view today. 

A more reasonable view is that:

1. The Genesis story is mythical and symbolic and on a deep level is profoundly true, but it has nothing to do with science.
2. The idea that the interrelated interdependent complexity of the universe or any part of it, i.e., life, an eye, a human, is an accumulation of random accidents is just absurd. Theism may stretch rational thinking; atheism abandons it.