Religion and Evolution

I was reading a post thanks to another blogger entitled silly religous beliefs that descirbes several interesting philosophies.  One item in particular doesn;t make much sense.  The argument appears to be that if you believe that God has a hand in evolution, he would speed things along to make us better.  For example, 

If there had been a divine hand tinkering with the process, we would expect evolution to have proceeded radically differently than it has. We would expect to see, among the changes in anatomy from generation to generation, at least an occasional instance of the structure being tweaked in non-gradual ways. We would expect to see -- oh, say, just for a random example -- human knees and backs better designed for bipedal animals than quadrupeds.

This statement makes an assumption that God, would have some desire to forcefully make our individual lives better, to make us live longer, or live better lives.  The basic error of this thought appears to be that He would direct us to move along faster, yet if He wanted us to move along faster, why wouldn't he just make us better for the start?  Maybe the whole idea is for us to start as single cell creatures and develop as best we can and use the tools available to make ourselves better.   We can create an environment for ourselves to grow or we can also kill ourselves off.  If we believe in the basic nature where He gave us free will, He also probably gave everything and everyone the same free will.  The beauty of that thought is that it allows us to be totally different in many ways yet does not disprove or prove evolution.  I personally belive that evolution is a great a mechanism used to help us evolve towards the human beings we should become.

Could everything be random?  Yes it is possible, but we eventually come to basic question of the science alone does not prove or disprove a God.  Even if we look at the billions and billions of stars, and assume a big bang occurred at some time to make everything, where did the original matter come from to make the big bang?

I will admit that there are parts of the bible that don't make sense and can't be accepted as devine inspiration or God's handiwork.  There are many ritualistic things that are unrealistic, too many inconsistencies, for the entire bible to be entirely true.  Where did the wives of Cain and Able come from for example? 

Unfortunately, the bible was written by men, translated by men, books to be included in the current bible were editted and selected by men at the Council of Nicea, etc.  In the name of the chuches, Catholics burned and tortured people, Popes sent children to be slaves in the Children's Crusade, Protestants tortured Catholics in Ireland, and I am sure none of those items are listed as tenants of good faith in the bible.  We assume that the people making the decisions would be unjudgemental about the legitimacy of each potential text but that "free will" part keeps getting in the way.  For the bible to be literally accepted as proposed, it presumes that everyone making these judgements and edits and selections were doing it with complete pure thoughts with no vested interests in the outcome. 

Maybe it is the cynic in my personal thought, but after decades of living, I have yet to see a group of people that don't have a personal bebefit in mind when decisions are made.  That makes it hard for me to believe in literal language of the bible, mainly because men have a bad tendency to do what is in their own best interest.  Individually, a man might do the right thing, but as a group, we tend to not always act properly. 

While a 100% literal belief is desired by conventional religion, it is easy for me to believe that the book is a series of thoughts on how we SHOULD behave.  That is the guidance that we all need in our lives to do what is right for people, to encourage others to also do what is right.  That is the important thing to be learned from the bible. 

We all need to find a way to get along and most religous texts tell us that being good to others will make our own lives better and more fulfilling.  The belief in the basic good in mankind makes life worthwhile.  If we can at least consider that there are good things found in believing that religion is beneficial then it no longer needs to be proved or disproved.  And whether evolution is God inspired or not, it is irrelevant to whether there are great teachings in the bible.