In his review of R. Soloveitchik’s The Emergence of Ethical Man, Haim Watzman (via Hirhurim) puts his finger on the most irritating part of the evolution-vs-intellegent-design debate.

The lines in the case of God v. Darwin could not be clearer. Counsel for the party of the first part claims that the principle of evolution by natural selection cannot be transcendentally true because it reserves no place for God. Counsel for the party of the second part does not dispute the fact that there is no place for God in biology. However, it draws a different conclusion—God at best simply does not exist; at worst, He is responsible for error and superstition.

Like a lawsuit, a public debate doesn’t encourage subtle reasoning. To win over public opinion, each side needs to present its case clearly and simply. Ambiguities are dangerous because they can be read as weakness or uncertainty.

For R. Soloveitchik, there is no contradiction between “divine creation and mechanistic evolution as such”. The problem, rather, is the seeming irreconcilability of “man as the bearer of the divine image with the equality of man and animal-plant existences.” It’s this subtle distinction that is lost in the public debate and it’s worth thinking about seriously. As R. Soloveitchik argues in several places, our rabbis were well aware of the tension between man-as-animal and man-as-divine-being. Watzman summarizes R. Soloveitchik’s approach as follows:

[T]he puzzle is that we are ethical beings. We encounter the physical world just as plants and animals do—that is, we have physical needs, desires, and instincts. Yet, unlike other beings, we can think about the world and consider our actions. We can resist our instincts, understand them, understand the desires and actions of other human beings. It is this difference that Rabbi Soloveitchik seeks to understand, through a consideration of our biological characteristics, the biblical creation story, and the halakhic tradition.
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[The Emergence of Ethical Man] takes you directly into a great mind as it considers arguments, analyzes concepts, and strives to develop a cogent account of how a transcendent God can act within a physical world that runs according to a set of natural laws that can be deduced through scientific activity.