Thanks for your comments. Sorry it took several days for me to approve them; I didn’t take a computer with me to the ASA meeting, so I wasn’t checking comments for several days.

As a fellow believer, I fully agree with you that the fruitfulness of evolutionary processes are miraculous; only a supremely intelligent agent (our Creator God) could conceive, implement and sustain such a wondrous universe. On this blog, it’s not my intention to debate the evidence for or against evolution; there are other forums for that. For me personally, the fact of common descent (and evolution in general) is completely “settled” and the purpose of my blog is to discuss the implications of that fact. This is the reason why I don’t feel compelled to explain or defend the evidence; I simply stated it in this post to explain this prior assumption for my explorations.

I am not saying that I am 100% impervious to a change of understanding about the scientific evidence; new scientific discoveries may require changes in the current paradigm. However, for me, the implications of scientific understanding for belief and faith in God are far more important. In other words, my purpose currently is to “test” the scientific understanding against Christian theology. Unless I come to discover and sense (in my own mind and heart, by God’s grace and peace) that core faith issues cannot be reconciled to that current scientific understanding, I am not likely to re-evaluate the scientific conclusion about the basic fact of evolution. So far in my meditation and study, I have not encountered any theological issues that are any more difficult to comprehend or trust in an evolutionary creationist perspective than in the non-evolutionary ones. I would hope that you also would be continually doing the same exercise from your scientific understanding.

Peace of Christ to you!
Doug

Theodosius Dobzhansky was not a Roman Catholic; he was a Russian Orthodox believer, though his theology as far as I can tell was probably not orthodox and thus not Orthodox. There is an interesting study of his religious views in “Eminent Lives in Twentieth-Century Science and Religion,” ed. Nicolaas Rupke. http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?vID=56803&vLang=F&vHR=1&vUR=2&vUUR=3

Most (nearly all) leading Christian scientists of his generation who accepted evolution were not orthodox, IMO. They mostly did not believe in the divinity of Jesus or the bodily resurrection, e.g. This is one of those things that has changed markedly in the past 30 years. Today we have numerous prominent Christian scientists who accept both evolution and the Nicene Creed, without crossing their fingers. This phenomenon has been hard for some to accept — Dawkins finds this as hard to accept as Phil Johnson.