What's a "Darwinist"?

A reader at Andrew Sullivan's blog asks:

What is evil for the Darwinist? Simply an externality of the struggle of the fittest? For all the pretensions of science, and all their discounting of the mythical understanding of man, do they really expect us to believe that thousands upon thousands of years of evolution -- that is, making us fit for this world, adapting to this world -- ends in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (or Auschwitz)?

I love answering stupid questions. It makes me feel so much smarter than I really am.

The answer to that reader's question is: Many people do not assume that good always wins. If you think that history is a story where good has to win in the end, then it makes no sense that evolution could be true, because evil is obviously still with us. But maybe, in the real world we live in, good doesn't always win. Maybe evil will destroy the world someday. The reader doesn't want to acknowledge that as a possibility; fine. He wants to believe things that are pleasant. Fine. But he should understand that there are people for whom believing in pleasant things is not the top priority.

Now here's my question: What is a "Darwinist"? Are there some people running around saying that "survival of the fittest" is the way the world ought to be? If so, I would personally view such people as cranks. You don't see anyone going around espousing the moral rightness of Newton's Laws of Motion, or the germ theory of disease. There are no priests giving sermons on the rightness of the Schroedinger Equation. I hope.

By using the term "Darwinists," this reader (along with many others who use the term) is implying that scientists who promote a certain theory are asserting the moral rightness of that theory. That, in general, is not the case. But even if there were such scientist/preachers, it would not make science and religion equivalent. It would just mean that some people were making a religion that made reference to scientific results. If I'm a wallpaper-hanger who happens to commit genocide, that doesn't mean that wallpaper-hanging is genocide.

Now here's my next question, to anyone who feels like answering: Suppose God really did create humanity exactly as it's described in the Bible. Suppose (and I don't discount the possibility) that that was an incontrovertible fact. What would that tell us about good and evil?

(Now while you think about that, I'll go back to thinking about what to write for my third-year paper...)