This might interest you, Frannie, from the New York Times:

[The President] asked all Americans to pause at 3 p.m. on Monday for a moment of remembrance. And he addressed head-on his own lack of military service, in one of the few passages that brought applause from the crowd.“My grandfather served in Patton’s army in World War II; I cannot know what it is like to walk into battle,” the president said. “I’m the father of two young girls, but I can’t imagine what it is like to lose a child. These are things I cannot know. But I do know this: I am humbled to be the commander-in-chief of the finest fighting force in the history of the world.”

Our belief in, for example, the truth of Newton’s Laws of motion, Einstein’s Relativity, and evolution can be tested scientificially.  A belief in the truth of the existence of God cannot be tested scientificially.  Thus, science and belief are two separate and non-overlapping aspects of human creativity.  It’s fine to believe in God or a higher power, if you want.  However, any assertion that God (or the higher power) did or did not do a certain thing requires proof.  In the absence of proof, such an assertion is a manifestation of FAITH and faith is completely different from scientific proof.  It is necessary to recognize the difference between FAITH and SCIENTIFIC TRUTH.  The latter can be proven by repeated and reproducible experiments or with data that yield consistent results, the former cannot.  Thus, FAITH and SCIENTIFIC TRUTHS are completely different - BY DEFINITION.

If God guided evolution to where we are now (and where we are going), why did (s)he bother with evolution? 

Did God create all living things in six days and rest on the seventh, having created Adam and Eve and all the rest?

Or did God create unicellular life after self-replicating RNA molecules became encased in lipid bilayer envelopes and then watch, or guide, evolution?

Evolution (in the accepted scientific sense) and God as Creator (a matter of faith) are not incompatible.    However, "Intelligent design" specifically denies evolution. 

What is "Intelligent Design" Creationism?

"Intelligent Design" creationism (IDC) is a successor to the "creation science" movement, which dates back to the 1960s. The IDC movement began in the middle 1980s as an antievolution movement which could include young earth, old earth, and progressive creationists; theistic evolutionists, however, were not welcome. The movement increased in popularity in the 1990s with the publication of books by law professor Phillip Johnson and the founding in 1996 of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (now the Center for Science and Culture.) The term "intelligent design" was adopted as a replacement for "creation science," which was ruled to represent a particular religious belief in the Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard in 1987.

IDC proponents usually avoid explicit references to God, attempting to present a veneer of secular scientific inquiry. IDC proponents introduced some new phrases into anti-evolution rhetoric, such as "irreducible complexity" (Michael Behe: Darwin’s Black Box, 1996) and "specified complexity" (William Dembski: The Design Inference, 1998), but the basic principles behind these phrases have long histories in creationist attacks on evolution. Underlying both of these concepts, and foundational to IDC itself, is an early 19th century British theological view, the "argument from design."

The essence of the argument from design is that highly complex phenomena (such as the structure of the vertebrate eye) demonstrate the direct action of the hand of God. Modern ID proponents typically substitute cellular or sub-cellular structures (such as the rotor motor of a bacterium’s whip-like flagellum) for anatomical complexity, but make the same argument: the appearance of complexity in nature categorically cannot be explained through natural causes; it requires the guidance of an "intelligent agent."

Following Phillip Johnson’s lead, IDC promoters focus less on "proving" creationism and more on rejecting evolution and redefining science to make it more compatible with their version of Christianity. IDC advocates attack evolution as a way of attacking science itself because they believe it is the foundation of materialist philosophy. This strategy is explicitly laid out in The Wedge, a fund raising document from the Center for Science and Culture that set forth the group’s "Governing Goals":

* To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
* To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.

Although in the 1990s IDC advocates had encouraged the teaching of ID in public school science classes as an alternative to evolution, in the early 2000s they shifted their strategy. IDCs currently concentrate their efforts on attacking evolution. Under innocuous-sounding guises such as "academic freedom," "critical analysis of evolution," or "teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution," IDCs attempt to encourage teachers to teach students wrongly that there is a "controversy" among scientists over whether evolution has occurred. So-called "evidence against evolution" or "weaknesses of evolution" consist of the same sorts of long-discredited arguments against evolution which have been a staple of creationism since the 1920s and earlier.

(From http://ncseweb.org/creationism/general/what-is-intelligent-design-creationism?gclid=CM2emavxz5oCFQKaFQod_E4k2Q)

Sorry, Ha Bibi, it is highly likely that the first self-replicating organisms lacked DNA but used RNA both as genetic material and as catalysts.  See for example:

The phrase "The RNA World" was coined by Walter Gilbert in 1986 in a commentary on the then recent observations of the catalytic properties of various RNAs. The RNA World referred to an hypothetical stage in the origin of life on Earth. During this stage, proteins were not yet engaged in biochemical reactions and RNA carried out both the information storage task of genetic information and the full range of catalytic roles necessary in a very primitive self-replicating system. Gilbert pointed out that neither DNA nor protein were required in such a primitive system if RNA could perform as a catalyst. At that time, it had only been demonstrated that RNA could cleave or ligate phosphodiester bonds. Nevertheless, as is a frequent occurrence in science, a general hypothesis was constructed from a few specific instances of a phenomenon. This hypothesis proved to be very effective in stimulating thought about the origin of life on Earth. Ensuing discoveries of other natural catalytic RNAs that could cleave and ligate phosphodiester bonds, and the very recent observation that the region surrounding the peptidyl transferase center of a bacterial 50S ribosomal subunit contains RNA and no protein, further buttress the hypothesis. Finally, the so-called "evolution in vitro" methodology, which is able to scan an enormous number of nucleic acid sequences in vitro for any given function, has revealed that RNA, indeed, can have many different catalytic functions as so can, presumably, DNA.

On further reflection, many doubts have been raised about whether or not the original genetic/catalytic material could have been RNA as we know it today because extreme conditions on the primitive Earth might have led to the rapid chemical degradation of RNA. Nevertheless, even if the precise chemical nature of the early genetic/catalytic material differed from present-day RNA, it seems reasonable to conclude that the RNA World did exist at some time. If very primitive life on Earth did not arise until about 3.5 billion years ago, there was, perhaps, a period of 0.5 billion years in which to sample many polymer sequences that originally arose through non-biochemical mechanisms and that ultimately evolved directed the first self-replicating systems.

(From http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/articles/altman/index.html)

Coming late to this discussion, I would like to clarify what the term "missing link" means.  Every living thing on earth evolved from simple unicellular (one-celled) organisms, whose origin has been postulated to be in an "RNA world" - that is to say a pre-DNA world.  We can recognize, in the genomes of unicellular organisms that are alive today AND in higher organisms (e.g., mammals such as ourselves), almost identical genes and mechanisms for the control of gene expression, as well as metabolic pathways for the conversion of available chemicals (e.g., oxygen, nitrogen and carbon in carbon dioxide) and food supplies (e.g., carbohydrates) into growing organisms and, then, offspring.  As the complexity of modern-day organisms increases (from simple bacteria, via yeasts, for example, to simple animals such as jellyfish and sponges, to invertebrates and vertebrates), we can follow the way genomes evolved from the simple (in one-celled organisms) to the complex (for example, ourselves Homo sapiens).  Thus, there are genes and metabolic pathways in humans that are almost identical to those in single-celled bacteria.

Furthermore, primates of all kinds are more similar to each other than they are to other higher organisms.  For example, chimpanzees are more similar to us than to dogs and cats, even though all have similar body plans.  Thus, not surprisingly, the genomes of primates are very similar:

• Rhesus macaque [monkey] genes are about 97.5 percent similar to those of chimps and humans. Chimps and humans have 99 percent of their gene sequences in common.
• Researchers have identified about 200 genes that show evidence of positive selection during evolution, making these genes potential candidates for determining the differences among primate species. These genes are involved in hair formation, immune response, membrane proteins and sperm-egg fusion.

In the context of modern genetics, an animal classified as a "missing link" would be a previously unidentified species of animal whose genome was intermediate, in terms of similarity, between that of a known primate that is a close relative of ours and humans ourselves.  The new fossil is a candidate, because of the way it looks (its genome has, obviously, not been sequenced), for such an intermediate animal. 

The term "missing link" is old-fashioned and, perhaps, confusing.  A better term for the present fossil would be "putative missing intermediate, with respect to physical characteristics, on the branch of the evolutionary tree that leads to Homo sapiens."

Finally, an acceptance of evolution in no way precludes a belief in the existence of God, because God could have easily created evolution if she had wanted to.

No, no, no.  The phrase is, "That’s water UNDER the bridge"!

Idiom Definitions for ‘Water under the bridge’ If something belongs to the past and isn’t important or troubling any more, it is water under the bridge.