Of course not! Mendel was a scientist as well as a theologian. He was looking for God's laws, not God himself. Perhaps he would acknowledge that the only "mystical intervention" that God ever did was "in the Beginning" — and He's been pretty much keeping "hands-off" ever since (except for occasional and comparatively rare direct interventions — which we call "miracles" because we don't know what else to call them.)
To repeat myself: Mendel was not only a Christian cleric; he was a full-blown scientist.
Unlike in our present age, Mendel probably never ever thought that there was some deep, irreconcilable, mutually-exclusive divide between theology and science. That is a post-modernist, "progressivist" notion that in all likelihood he had not heard of, and which likely would have been unimaginable to him.
As a life-long student of human history and culture, may I observe that never before our own times did human beings believe in this so-called "Cartesian split" in the human knowledge domain. Descartes himself would probably have been appalled by this so-called "split." After all, he himself said that the idea of God is the most fundamental idea a man can have, on which is based every other possible idea a man can have, including the idea of his own conscious self.
The fact of the matter is: philosophy (and theology as the "queen of metaphysics") and science have been intimately engaged with each other for some 7 millennia at least. They have cross-pollinated ideas since Day One.
I cite as evidence the profound influence of Newtonian mechanics in the shaping of the philosophical ideas of such notables as Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, et al.
To disparage philosophy is to express the preference for walking around on only one leg....
A person can always choose to do that, I'm sure. But why? It is ever so much more difficult to walk on one leg, when two are available to make our progress less difficult and more convenient....
So, why choose to walk on only one leg?
That [God] already knows the End — the purpose and goal of His Creation — does not affect its free development "In-Between" its Beginning and End...There are rules and guides to the system; but within those constraints, there is every possible scope for novelty to emerge in physical nature, via an evolutionary process.and
Perhaps [Mendel] would acknowledge that the only "mystical intervention" that God ever did was "in the Beginning" — and He's been pretty much keeping "hands-off" ever since...Given that, I really don't see what your problem with evolution is--what it is that you're insisting is there that "evos" somehow deny. If you said "In the beginning, God created a universe in which evolution, acting according to His laws, produced all the life forms we see today, with no need for further intervention," you'd get very little argument. But it seems that, for some reason, you can't bring yourself to say that.
And I would agree. I think God created a universe that is self consistent and progresses according to the natural laws that God designed.
Science only works when we make that assumption - that things are working according to natural laws.
Belief in a law giver is optional. But to me it logically follows that a universe created and unfolding according to natural laws had a law giver.