The world is not full of items stamped “made by God”—the Creator is more subtle than that—but there are two locations where general hints of the divine presence might be expected to be seen most clearly. One is the vast cosmos itself, with its fifteen-billion-year history of evolving development following the big bang. The other is the “thinking reed” of humanity, so insignificant in physical scale but, as Pascal said, superior to all the stars because it alone knows them and itself.

From childhood, people are sensitive to evidence of purposefulness in the environment and concerning objects in that environment. In fact, there may be a tendency to attribute design to such things even when evidence is thin—in a way that is similar to the hypersensitive agency detection device. This tendency is sometimes called “promiscuous teleology” or, used in the context of inference to supernatural agents, “intuitive theism.”

When we look across times and cultures and find very similar beliefs concerning the nature of physical, biological, and psychological reality, those similarities cry out for some explanation. Since these different individuals have a very diverse range of experience, something other than common experience alone just might account for the similarities of belief. In some cases we can fairly conclude that there is a common nature – some fundamental similarity in how human cognition works – that underlies broadly shared beliefs.

Once separated from the larger population, the smaller “founding” group no longer received new alleles from it, nor passed new alleles that arose back to it. Despite being two populations of the same species, they were now genetically sealed off from one another, and differences in allele frequencies began to accrue between them.

…in small populations, drift can have a large impact on allele frequencies from one generation to the next. In large populations, natural selection predominates, and drift has little impact. Both of these mechanisms can contribute to changing allele frequencies over time within populations, and as such both can be factors that contribute to speciation events.

With so many issues to discuss, Christians can easily get the feeling that science is always attacking the faith. It is essential to balance such conversations with positive responses to God’s creation. After all, the primary response to the natural world in the Bible is to praise the God who made it.

"Many homeschool parents contact me or show up at my office and quietly say, 'Is there anything besides Young Earth Creationists?'"

I believe that when the truth of Christianity is under consideration in the context of science, it is with these issues relating to the resurrection that the discussion needs to begin. Only when a case has been made for the belief that God was present in Jesus of Nazareth in a unique way does it then become possible adequately to attempt to enquire into the significance of his crucifixion.

What do today’s pastors think about science? What views do they hold on creation and evolution and how strongly do they hold them? How do origins issues impact their ministries? These were just a few of the questions that motivated us at BioLogos to commission a survey of pastors on origins

Even being right is not the end goal. Knowledge and being able to fathom mysteries has no meaning apart from love.

I saw people who were real, kind, loving, complicated and sometimes, just sometimes (at least in my opinion), they were wrong.

Taken together, these mechanisms introduce variation into populations, and since that variation is in DNA, the variation is heritable. Variation at the chromosome level may influence the function of genes, and ultimately traits at the level of the organism.

Taken together, the properties of DNA match what we observe in nature: faithful reproduction of form, but not perfect reproduction of form. At its base, constancy and heritable variation in biological populations trace back to how DNA functions.

The practice of science, and the practices of the world of technology that emerge from science, is one of the determinative features of our world, for better and for worse. Those practices in some ways give life to the deepest hopes we could have for human flourishing in the Christian tradition.