Your humble Smallholder is both a Christian and an evolutionist. The first because of faith and the second because I can think logically.

I’ve often thought (and I have no theological grounding in this) that the story of the apple isn’t really about one particular woman choosing to try the forbidde fruit, but an analogy to the point where our brains evolved to the point that reason and not instinct drove our actions. The apple, I thought, was a symbol for free will. And then we could make moral judgments (in the Bible we knew we were naked). You don’t condemn a crocodile for eating a man. You do condemn Jeffrey Dahmer.

Over at Jason Rosenhouse’s Evolution Blog, commentor (commentator?) James McGrath has an interesting observation. Perhaps the point of evolution was the creation of free will.

I still think that one can make a better case for why a God of the sort traditionally envisaged by Christian theology (not necessarily popular thought in that tradition) would create through evolution than for some other method. If God’s aim was to create free beings, then it is unclear how else that could be accomplished. If one creates a first ‘Adam and Eve’ as adults, then they must be pre-programmed with all the things humans learn growing up. If they are created as infants, then what? Raised by wolves? Raised by angels? Evolution certainly makes sense as a process that can produce this end, even though it is clearly extremely wasteful in the process.

Interesting…