Darwin says that living things can adapt to their environment, and we can adapt living things, i.e. breeding of domestic livestock.

It does not say how life started - that is a different question altogether.

And the religious synthesis says that God adapts things to fit His environment (Creation). Of course, that's what Papaya's scientists did with their aemoeba too. But it's Design, not Darwinism.

Here's a classic glass-half-full/half-empty situation: this could just as well be titled "We Are All Evolutionists Now."

Mikey: Yup.

OJ: No, it was E. coli bacteria.

We've all been evolutionists since Genesis--which describes Creation as an evolutionary process. Had Darwin departed from evolution no one would have listened. He's a product of the culture.

Here's an excerpt worthy of attention (sorry about the length):

But Dowd’s preaching also draws on more contemporary scientific thinking. Central to his pitch about a “God-glorifying, Christ-edifying, Scripture-honoring way of thinking about evolution” is how findings from evolutionary psychology might help people overcome guilt about their immoral or unhealthful behaviors. “We live in a world today that is very different from the world that our instincts evolved to deal with,” he says. “We have cravings for sugar, salts and fats because for 99 percent of human history, we didn’t have easy access to those things.” Likewise, he says, addictions like sex and drugs are part of our inner proclivities. “Today we have a far more empirical way of talking about human nature than through stories like the original sin,” Dowd says. [...]

Nonetheless, Dowd’s views do bring solace to some, going by reactions from parishioners who claim that a scientific perspective has helped them come to terms with their follies of the past. For some at least, the recognition of genetic and biochemical frailty is a healing act. Last fall, for example, after Bob Miller, an 81-year-old man, heard Dowd’s sermon at a Unitarian church in Pensacola, Fla., he felt his guilt over a string of affairs from four decades ago melting away. “I could never quite understand why I had behaved that way,” says Miller, who was climbing the corporate ladder when his infidelities began, leading to the breakup of his marriage. When Dowd began talking about viewing moral lapses against the backdrop of evolution, “suddenly a light went on inside my head,” Miller says. His rising status at his company, he concluded, had probably contributed to increased testosterone. “I think the physical change in my body was so strong that it completely overpowered any moral teachings and religious beliefs I had,” Miller says. “It was still inexcusable, but it made more sense.”

Now, I think it's pretty obvious that Mr. Miller really does feel that the genetic explanation exonerates him to some extent, and that his protestations otherwise are nonsense. If he truly felt that his acts were inexcusable, then the original sin thesis is at least as good of an explanation as the genetics reasoning. It's hard to see why the genetic explanation makes him feel better, unless he's actually looking for someone to make him feel better about what he did.