Among Collins’s most controversial beliefs is that of “theistic evolution”, which claims natural selection is the tool that God chose to create man. In his version of the theory, he argues that man will not evolve further.

“I see God’s hand at work through the mechanism of evolution. If God chose to create human beings in his image and decided that the mechanism of evolution was an elegant way to accomplish that goal, who are we to say that is not the way,” he says.

“Scientifically, the forces of evolution by natural selection have been profoundly affected for humankind by the changes in culture and environment and the expansion of the human species to 6 billion members. So what you see is pretty much what you get.”

Emphasis added. What a foolish, petty, human-centric view of the divine this man has. Does he really think that these petty, fleeting, passing bodies and their limited, erratic minds are the end of the line for evolution?

Sexual selection is a massive continuing evolutionary pressure in the west (hello, skinny girls) never mind the simple fact that people who choose to have many children will assuredly outcompete those who choose to have few (one could say this is a genetic bias for those who like having a lot of kids.)

I’m all for concepts like “evolution is how god choose to create people” – as a Hindu, I’m moderately sure, on the preponderance of evidence, not all of which fits into lab settings, that there is Something Out There. But I am also sure that this Something Out There is the god of the Dolphins and the Whales and the Ants as much as it is the god of the hairless monkeys, and the androcentrism of that particular hairless monkey’s approach to god is… well… kind of disgusting.

We are not the end of the line, the pinnacle of anything. We’re a particular form that life currently takes, and there was a before, and very likely there will be an after. To suggest that humans are the crown of creation is to make god in our own flawed image, rather than to accept our actual role in the scheme of things: a reflective ape that gazes on the world with a glimmer of hope and understanding, and should know, from one glance up at the night sky, that the journey of life is scarcely even begun.