Respectfully I disagree with you here Mike.

Most of my Christian friends from high school walked away for similar reasons. They were so passionate. They witnessed. They read several times more bible chapters everyday than I. They prayed. It’s like being the sole survivor of a plane crash: it seems unfair that I’m still here.

Good point. Also, another possibility is that the process of evolution (or at least the cruelness of it) is a result of the fall working retroactively.

http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2010/06/trojan-horse.html

Again, courtesy of Michael Flynn (and since I’m ripping off quoting so much of his work, plus he’s a co-religionist and of Irish descent to boot, I should get the plug in for his excellent SF-and-religion novel, “Eifelheim” – rush out and buy, folks!):

http://m-francis.livejournal.com/139135.html#cutid1

“5. The End of Evolution
Much of the modern problem of understanding stems from the rejection of final causes. This was due to fear of Early Moderns that if final causes were recognized, then God would have to be admitted. That is, establishing finality is hard; but once you do, God pops out like Jack-in-the-Box which startles small children and modern sophisticates. But this gets it backward. Aquinas thought that finality in nature was obvious, but reasoning from there to God was very difficult. After all, Aristotle saw finality in nature too; but never concluded a God from it.

Hence, the modern sees everything in terms of a certain kind of efficient cause, and the old idea of God is pasteurized into an engineer sitting at a drafting table having a bit of fun with the platypus before getting down to the serious business of puff adders and praying mantises. God must be some sort of efficient cause, too; right?

Actually, evolution is very hard to get to using only efficient causality. Not even Dawkins can avoid teleology in his writings. (His famous example of deriving a sentence from a series of random letters is not only teleological — he has the target sentence already in mind; but unDarwinian — the intermediate sentences do not make sense and so are “unfit” for their niche as information-bearers. The real trick is to start with an intelligible sentence and, by accumulating random mutations and eliminating the results that become unintelligible, wind up with a different sentence. Better yet: start with the Don Quixote genome (biblionome?) and watch it mutate into Moby Dick! “

Courtesy of Mike Flynn’s blog:

Nature is nothing but the plan of some art, namely a divine one, put into things themselves, by which those things move towards a concrete end: as if the man who builds up a ship could give to the pieces of wood that they could move by themselves to produce the form of the ship.
(Commentary on Physics II.8, lecture 14, no. 268)