As systems for determining what to believe, religion and science are, arguably, fundamentally at odds. Religion, in general, takes direct experience of the divine and of things created by the divine as the fundamental source of truth, sometimes transmitted via texts or oral tradition. Science prefers quantifiable data combined with tests to discriminate between one possible truth and another. In many cases, it would require great contortions to make these two methods yield the same answers.
On the other hand, the two are in conflict less than it seems, because for the most part they are answering different questions. Even when scientists frame a question as “why”, they are typically looking for a mechanism, which in a larger context is really a “how” question. Except for religious literalism (where religion is expected to provide the mechanism as well as the motive), religion generally focuses on “why”, and it is usually easy to reconcile religious and scientific belief by keeping this separation.
Evolution is a perfect example of where this intellectual division could work very well. An omniscient, omnipotent deity would choose things to create, and design and operate the mechanisms for creating them, just as a puppeteer might bring a character alive by building and then operating a marionette. Science cannot answer why that particular character was chosen and what its purpose is, but science can describe the strings and how their manipulation brings about the character’s observed behavior. Whereas at a human level evolution may be a complex interplay of dynamics driven in part by random events, at a divine level, an all-knowing deity cannot help but see what the results of the initial design will be. One of the inevitable consequences of being both omniscient and omnipotent is that every result is intentional.
In other words, the simple way to reconcile religion and evolution is to say that evolution is the mechanism by which the deity chose to implement the divine intentions. In fact, because the act of design and the act of creation cannot be separated, a direct (though not literal) reading of the Judeo-Christian genesis story is completely consistent with evolution. While in the worldly understanding of time science maps out when, over the course of hundreds of millions of years, the divine creations became manifest in a way that we happen to be able to measure, the actual act of creation may have happened over seven days.
