It would rather help the cause of religion to give up this futile hostility, given that an acknowledgement of the reality of Evolution guides the right-thinking person towards the living of a religious life, in particular one that mandates the absolute minimum of indulgence in sexual activity, if not total abstinence and celibacy.
If the mechanisms of Evolution are truly statistical, it follows inevitably that they operate most effectively in conditions of perfect mixing or maximal randomness, what mathematicians call ergodic conditions. Any deviation from randomness owing to some principle of determinism, moral imperative, supra-mundane intervention and so on, can only hamper the undeviating certitude with which Evolution aspires to its goal: the Survival of the Fittest through Natural Selection .
The evolution of the living kingdom is the paradigm of a dynamical system operating by virtue of an "Action Principle" . Such a system moves, either causally, or in terms of long range statistical averages, in obedience to the variation of an expression, a 'Lagrangian', or 'Hamiltonian' which "naturally selects" its extremals, those organisms most able to adapt to and survive under the boundary conditions of a given environment.
One can actually go further and state that, after two billion years, not only have organisms evolved to survive with a high degree of fitness, but that Evolution itself has also evolved to the point where its mechanisms tend to create situations in which they can operate at maximum efficiency!
This brings us to the fallacy of " safe sex": it is totally contrary to the evolutionary order of Nature that sex be, or become, safe. On the contrary, Evolution encourages, in fact demands , the maximum degree of irresponsibility in such matters as proliferation, genetic diversity, ( including anomalies of every kind), mutations, (anomalous, beneficial or lethal), infant mortality , parental maturity: all the things which we, as human beings, agonize over when we contemplate bringing new beings into this world, or invent technologies, such as condoms, to enhance the security of the participants in sexual acts, or to protect their consequences.
One can only admire the great ingenuity that Nature has demonstrated in leading us to imagine that we can control a process such as Evolution, which functions best only when it is out of control.
What Nature 'discovered' , , through random trial and error millions of years ago, is that the best way to deceive human beings into consenting, willingly or even eagerly, in the activities which lead to the creation of new human beings, is to drive them insane.
Sexual infatuation, macho pride, intimidation, physical pain, peer pressure and the psychic trauma of rejection are the primary forms of coercion which are built into us through 2 billion years of Evolution, to prod us into violating simple precautions of common sense and sanity, torturing mind and body with the erotic delusions that make for maximum ergodicity in procreation.
The sexual appetite both is, and is not, like the more mundane appetites such as hunger, thirst, sleep, relief from boredom, the need for shelter, and so on. No substance is ingested, no toxin released ( or, if eggs and sperm be toxins, like urine, feces, mucus, saliva, no copulation is needed to evacuate them) . The body is neither restored, as in sleep, nor built up, as it is through eating. Sex doesn't protect its practitioners from anything, in the way that a house, coat or umbrella do. Indeed, if anything it renders us more vulnerable. Quoting Francis Bacon, it leads us to produce "hostages to fortune".
Still it is, somehow, an appetite. As a hypothesis I suggest that it is an external appetite . Entertaining for a moment a kind of 'reduced Gaia' hypothesis, that the entire human race may be, in some higher sense, functioning as a single living entity , (the 'world spirit' idea of Schopenhauer) this 'global body' regularly becomes 'hungry' owing to a severe deficiency from time to time in the numbers of its individuated cells , namely human beings, in the same way that our physical bodies hunger when their substance has been metabolized or fallen into decay.
Even as we deal with the suffering of hunger by ingesting food, so this 'global body' relieves the ache of deficiency in numbers of human types by impelling heart, mind and body towards sexual activity.
Whatever one thinks of it, something like this hypothesis is needed to explain why an urge that neither restores nor protects us, that, if it is a craving, is almost entirely a craving of the imagination, can still be considered one of our fundamental appetites.
As long as we submit our minds to the process of evolution, Nature will always be cleverer than we are. Evolution, which brought us to what we are, is not about to hand control over to us. The laws of proliferation are of necessity blind. We are their subjects, and can only be brought to some awareness of how they operate through withdrawal from the mainstream, that is to say a lifestyle of moderate indulgence sexual activity, or even one of complete celibacy.
In no way is it my intention to suggest that it can ever be wise or moral to ignore common precautions such as contraceptives and condoms. To use an analogy: the death rate among human beings is 100%, yet no sane person will leave an infection or serious illness untreated, nor forget to set a broken arm, or walk off a cliff. Fundamentalist Christian proscriptions against condoms and contraceptives , rather that exemplifying a higher morality, are in fact contrary to common sense, if not insane, and often highly immoral as well, particularly when applied to the Third World.
However: what the Catholics' "natural law", and the biologist's "laws of nature" do have in common, is the recognition that "safe sex", in the long run, is a ludicrous oxymoron. No matter what we do, Nature will always contrive ways to do an end-run around all our attempts to control, on a global scale, the proliferation of human beings, or to apply eugenic principles based on pseudo-rational notions of whom deserves to survive and who doesn't.
A thousand vulnerabilities, both physical and mental, are built into the sex act itself. Sex makes its participants, at least in the period of the act, weak, hostile, fearful and stupid. The roots of this severe depletion of affect date back billions of years, when Evolution itself evolved ways to maximize the functioning of irresponsibility in procreation.
Taken in a different context, there is nothing inherently negative in these states, provided they cause no lasting harm to oneself or others. We drink, smoke, use narcotics, even get drunk specifically for the purpose of becoming stuporous, that is to say, stupid. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, although one has to think twice about doing so when faced with having to drive an automobile 30 miles on a slippery road.
To be weak is surely a keen delight, for what else is sleep if not such a state? Agression? We watch films in which dozens of actors, surrogate human beings, go through the horrors of hell. We enjoy games, in which each participant is determined to trounce the opponent. All in good fun.
As for fear, it is the root emotion governing all feats of adventure, travel, excitement, all the peak experiences that inspire states of transcendence beyond a commonplace existence.
However, although it is generally believed that sexual activities allow one to indulge in all of these delights, whether relaxing, comforting or adventurous, without causing any harm to anyone - that is to say, "safely" - the truth is that Nature has induced this delusion into our hearts and minds for the expression purpose of causing us to beget children in situations in which the highest possible of irresponsibility is dominant. Like the inevitable denouement of Oedipus's plight, irresponsibility, resisted with every weapon in our mental and social arsenal, prevails as the indispensable pre-condition for that cosmic dance of the Erotic and the Ergodic, that state of maximal efficiency in the operation of the causal mechanisms of Evolution.