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"But be careful with terminology. The words 'intelligent design' are not used to describe your outlook. It's prepostrous, but they have come to mean the garbage coming out the the Discovery Institute, the notion that some things are simply too complex to have evolved in a Darwinian manner. What you are describing, which I to some extent agree with, would be better termed 'providential design.'"

I like the term "providential design".

I think I will use it henceforth.
Well, no. Actually, I will just state the truth: I believe in Darwinian evolution, but that random chance that causes mutations, and the physical laws that cause things to operate, that's all God making decisions.

Darwinism, updated to reflect all of the intervening discoveries since 1859, does a good job of what happens when looking at life from WITHIN the system, which is where we live. It describes the WHAT and the HOW. Catholicism describes the WHY and the WHO, which is inherently outside of the system. Short of a direct theophany, when standing inside the system as we do, we can only directly see the WHAT and the HOW, and that's the appropriate sphere of natural science. The WHY and the WHO that make the WHAT and the HOW happen - that's religion. And I happen to believe that the Catholic religion gets it right.

Which is why I am both a committed natural science, and a Roman Catholic, and I do not feel the slightest twinge of conflict at all between the two. When I look at a tree, or the periodic table, or the harmony of the astronomical spheres, I see at once natural laws at work, describable by mathematics, and historically describable in their path by evolution (I am using the term "evolution" here to refer to both biological, Darwinian evolution, but also uniformitarian geological and chemical shifts over the ages). The only real article of FAITH, as such, in my naturalistic world view is uniformitarianism: that the constants of our equations have not changed at all, or if they have, have precessed only slowly over eons and eons. But when I look at that tree and those stars, and those laws and that entropic element of chance that keeps scrambling the pot and makes true belief in determinism quite unsustainable as an empirical matter, I see the will of God working it all out. I see in the remarkable fact of my own intelligence and consciousness something that is not explicable by a combination of determinism and chance.
But all of this is high philosophy and theology.

As a practical matter, I don't think that there should be anger over theoretical and observational science. Applied science? Sure. We can use the scientific method to clone humans and perfect methods of torture that would make the medievals look like amateurs. We can use science to mass execute the crippled. Applied science can be positively demonic. But looking out with the eyeballs God gave us, seeing what they see, carefully recording it and trying to figure Him out by figuring out his great masterpiece called the universe? I think that this is, rather, piety.

Lucretius, a non-Christian Roman of the 1st Century BC (and a philosophic forebear of Thomas Acquinas) wrote thus (in translation): "For true piety does not consist of bowing a veiled head before a graven image; this bustling to every altar; this bowing and prostration on the ground with palms outspread before the shrines of the gods, this deluging of altars with the blood of beasts; this heaping of vow on vow. True piety lies rather in the contemplation of the universe with a tranquil mind."

I agree.