As a theologian, I renounce all rights to make any authoritative statements about matters of natural science. To some, that may mean that I renounce any claim to speak about matters of fact at all. But there are many matters of fact that are not matters of natural science. It is a fact that Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo, but that, and many other particularities of history, will not find a place in any record of scientific discoveries or hypotheses. It is a fact that I am now thinking about what facts are, but again, natural scientists will not be professionally concerned with that fact. And it is a fact that either there is a God or there is not, though now that theology is not usually claimed to be a science (and it is definitely not a natural science), it is not a scientific fact.

I take it that it is an established fact of science that evolution occurs, and that human beings have descended by a process of mutation and adaptation from other and simpler forms of organic life over millions of years. The evidence for that does seem to be overwhelming. It seems to be equally firmly established that natural selection is the main driving force of evolutionary change; but my colleagues in evolutionary biology inform me that it is not agreed that natural selection is the only force, and that the mechanisms of evolution remain to some extent open to diverse interpretations.