Thanks for the very intelligent discussion of religion and science. In my theology and my experience, religion and science are not enemies but, rather, complement each other. It is also my experience that God interacts with the physical world according to Alfred North Whitehead's views of the physical world and his novel approach to cause and effect. God can, in reality, "lure" the physical "events" in our world away from what we might see as normal cause and effect, but, of course, God is much too wise to do so in ways that can be proven. To prove a miracle came from God would only invoke our very considerable human stubborness in the face of authority (for some of us) and invoke in others the desire to give all freedom and agency over to that authority in ways that deny their human freedom and render them useless to themselves, others, and God.

In similarly subtle ways, God interacts with humanity and higher animals through the inspiration of details and entire scenarios within the images in our visual imaginations, inspiring the sensitivities of our hearts, entering into the internal debates some of us hold in our heads, and bubbling new awareness up from deep within our intuitions,... all in ways that are so subtle they leave us free to ignore them and also free to claim those inspirations we choose to act on as our own brilliance. God does not need the credit for what God inspires in us, but only seeks to change the world through the ways we respond to those inspirations.

Finally, since science theorizes that, all things being equal, entropy wins out - that all things, left only under the influence of natural forces tend to disintegrate and diffuse into chaos - which would result in a sort of random combination of everything in the universe spread across space in a primordial soup of universal proportions, I take God to be the force of "Negentropy" (Schrödinger). That is, God is the force that keeps the universe organized into the form with which we're familiar. From this it can be extrapolated that it is God is "love" and it is, indeed, the force and power of God's love that holds all things together. Said another way, God is the "unifying force."

Profoundly unprovable, but as true as anything for me. In other words, God is not the enemy of science. God is science and inspiration and everything that is "good" and all we do that leads to the profound enhancement of life (our own and others) comes through God's inspiration.

Evil, then, becomes simply the pursuit of our own self-serving ends to the exclusion of God's inspiration. The fact that God's inspiration does not seem "good" to some of us is not a testament to our "evil" natures, but merely testimony to how severely we have been wounded by other humans, but that's an entirely different (though equally interesting) subject.

As we contemplate the end of the Bush regime, let us not forget this fundamental truth of our current political situation:

McBush

McCain

McSame

McCain

McBush

McSame

McCain

McBush

McSame

...but I repeat myself