Scientists have calculated that 95% of all species that ever existed are now extinct. If God made all the animals one has to wonder why he allowed so many creatures of his creation to go extinct? It makes no sense. But if you consider Evolution, survival of the fittest, it makes sense that species that could not adapt to world changes, were replaced by new species that were more fit to survive. Stronger species replaced unfit species in various life niches on our planet.

The author actually believes in evolution, but what he is doing is reconciling it with his religious belief.

I do believe wholeheartedly in evolution but struggle with the idea of living things evolving from non-living matter. This struggle can lead to you to conclude that God was the catalyst for this happening.

This also applies to the Big Bang theory, which can be proven down to 1 second after it happened. However, the equations fail to explain before that second. Again, this ambiguity can lead to attributing God as the catalyst.

I don't actually think God is responsible, but can definitely understand how he came to his conclusions.

I think there is more than 1 God thingie concept. It seems to me that those (atheist) that opposes anything of a God thingie concept like to stereotype and/or put all God thingies into one. I think It makes for a monotheism strawman.

i don’t think there’s a single greatest “stumbling block” because individual theists will find different things harder to reconcile. it probably is evolution for some. for me, it was the problem of evil that first shook me out of blind faith. i’ve heard that’s the weakest argument against god, but i’d probably still be a christian without it.

To put it kind of very simply, Evolutionary Processes are somewhat akin to a 'pot-luck' stew, i.e. things get chucked in in a kind of random manner, let simmer for a while and IF the stew comes out okay at the end, Well it gets made again, IF not and it comes out like something even a half-starved feral dog would pass up on, then evolution simply makes a change, or even 2 or more, to the recipe and goes through the process once again.

If there is an all intelligent god, it's an oxymoron. lol

I see no conflict with theism and evolution.

I was raised to believe that Darwin was a tool of Satan and that evolution is a lie and used to cause people to question the Biblical account of creation--and, therefore, original sin and the need for salvation through Jesus.

In these circles, you will see that evolution of a very minor scale (micro-evolution) is accepted--but speciation is absolutely denied. This is why fundamentalists have to cling to a young earth belief--they cannot allow the time that evolution (macro-evolution) needs.

I doesn’t matter.
You can not change someone’s mind.
Too much time is wasted on these types of conversations.

It doesn’t matter what any of here think as we have fairly similar beliefs.

Don't know enough about any non Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion to comment on their creation myths but according tothe Old Testamnt, we'd be evolving from fallen creatures-doesn't soundlike something any "god" would support. Then again, Genesis has so many fallacies in it that it is a really bad place to start from.
At the risk of offending any Big bangers here, in my (admittedly feeble) mind, the big bang theory is as crazy as Genesis, at least for the first nano-second. After that, evolution and cosmology wins hands down.

Of the fundamentalist I interacted with on a Yahoo group concerning evolution and creationism, the creationist seemed to believe that evolution was the greatest threat to their beliefs (even though most of them didn't actually understand evolution well if at all). I became aware that some very staunch defenders of evoluton were also religious. Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University comes to mind. Miller defended evolutionary theory back in the 1990's and 2000's when the Discovery Institute was causing a stir with their Intelligent Design movement and their irreducible complexity theories. Attorney and UC Berkeley Law Professor Phillip E. Johnson was one of Millers primary opponents at the time. Miller is a practicing Catholic who also completely accepted evolution. I don't recall, however, if Miller ever described how he reconciled the two concepts.

I personally do not favor a theistic point of view. That kind of god idea might spring from a desire to be a baby again—to have an easy and plush existence where all one’s needs are met by the parents.

At the same time, I can not accept that the universe with its consciously aware creatures came about through blind, random chance occurrences. That concept seems like a non-answer, raising more questions than it answers. It would be just as reasonable to say that God did it—neither response is meaningful.

What I lean toward thinking is that we are the creator—not our organic bodies but We collectively as conscious awareness itself, and that creation occurs continuously, moment by moment. That idea makes more sense in view of the findings of modern physics where time is said by some to be a non-existing illusion

We are only pitiful victims from the perspective of individual organisms. From a universal perspective, this is the best of all possible worlds.

This and a lot of other things are said by theists to defend their beliefs...it doesn’t add up to any more than their own rationalisation because they see the clear contradiction between the scientific evolutionary evidence and the scripture story of creation. They then need to attribute reasons why god must have “invented” evolution...which as we know is not how evolution works. It’s how many Christians are able to say they believe in science and god at the same time...god being in control of science along with everything else!

Ohferpetessake..........just No.

This might raise a smile:

‘… the philosopher Leibniz famously maintains that, since the world was created by God, and since the mind of God is the most benevolent and capable mind imaginable, the world must be the best world imaginable. Under such a system, humans perceive evil only because they do not understand the force governing the world and thus do not know that every ill exists only for a greater good’.
[sparknotes.com]

It was generally accepted that Leibnitz, who in all fairness was a genius, was being mocked by Voltaire in his book Candide. ‘All is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds’ was the mantra of Pangloss, Candide’s ever-optimistic tutor and philosopher.

I came across this first in, of all places, an episode of Sharpe’s Rifles.