For Christians (or anyone else) who deny Darwinian evolution.

[The Grand Nudger]

First, recognizing shapes and reacting to them is way way way more complicated then "moving toward the light". It would involve some sort of memory, some sort of if-then-else logic, and some way effect enough movement to make a difference. 

Memory, not so much...doesn't even require logic.  It can be machine implemented...and in fact, it is in living representatives in which light excites the photoreceptive cell... which directly provides both the impulse and the energy to move or effect change in some other structure. Cognition is wonderful, but probably not required for an organism (or machine) to present behaviors we would recognize as recognition. We would say, in the context of the simplest forms of light sensitive structures and organisms, that they recognize that they're in danger by a negative image...even though it;s not a truly cognitive type of recognition (or hey, maybe it is, but that's a whole different can of worms). Sometimes, the limitation is language.

Your description could be right. The point I have made 20 times already in this thread is that we really don't know how these things happened. If we don't know how, it cannot be a scientific fact. If it's not a scientific fact, it is a philosophical claim that it happened.

We -do- know that organisms inherit these structures.  We -do- know that mutations in dna alter these structures.  We -do- know that natural selection affects populations with these structures.  

The only inference now, with modern synth (see, genetics..the "synth" part.... turned alot of evolutionary theory into scientific fact), is that the processes which we still see happening today, happened yesterday, before we knew how to look or what we were looking for. We posit, further, that of all known factors that influence population genetics..and the subsequent structures dna builds...natural selection has been the broadest and most uniformly effective. We posit, further, that there is very little to nothing at all that this counldn't explain...that no other explanation is required. We posit..further, that this is the most efficient explanation. We posit, further, that the chance of modern synth being overturned, tommorrow, is vanishingly small. OTOH, all science is provisional, so maybe we'll learn something that modifies what we know. Maybe we'll learn, for example...that there was more atificial selection. You know..that your god played in the dirt with ameobas or somesuch.

That's the theory part, Steve.

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Fun times with science history.

When Darwin first proposed his idea of descent with modification, he was unaware of Mendels work.  It was a theory, because he could not demonstrate a mechanism by which those traits were passed on in the first place.  It very much seemed like they were, but how?  He could (and did) observe adaptive radiation...what he couldn't observe directly was allopatric speciation.

We're under no such handicap today.  

His most convincing argument was artificial selection.  At the time, breeding birds and dogs and roses was a widely popular hobby for his audience.  It's no coincidence that most of the objections to evolutionary biology come from a time when the best evidence for evolution was a directed breeding program, and from a time when what people now object to -was- a theory, as yet undemonstrated and undemonstrable.

We don't live in the late 1800's.

I say "we", but as surely as the sun goes down in the evening somebodies going to come along and present victorian objections to modern synth all over again.