You sound like someone that has a strong point to make. Could you elaborate? I’m most interested.
Ah, I haven’t sorted all my thoughts out into full coherence or a conclusion. Thinking out loud here:
My oldest son is on the autistic spectrum. I believe part of his difficulty is genetic, a genetic susceptibility at least if not the entire cause. He was not helpful as a small child. He didn’t try to be pleasing. If we lived in a small tribe on the edge of survival with tempers short someone probably would have had a go at him. Two of his siblings are much younger than he, 8 and 13 years. By the time they were 8 months old they knew not didn’t like to be touched and didn’t try to any more. Reading a potential threat and not angering a big guy is a definite survival trait when you’re little. It makes sense for God to give us survival traits, but it makes sense from the evolutionary point of view too.
It’s not that my son has no altruism; he has altruism in the large abstract sense. He wants to defend his country and its people by serving in the military. He has a conscience; he has insight into his deficits and lack of empathy; he asked for me to pray for him the other day, that he become a more decent person.
Consider how hormones influence behavior. DNA codes for oxytocin synthesis, and oxytocin promotes bonding and trust, especially of a woman to her husband in the marriage bed, and to her babies when she nurses them.
Men have oxytocin too; it’s just not so dramatic with them. People on the autistic spectrum may have lower levels of oxytocin or an unusual response to it.
Then there are the people with no conscience, no empathy and no altruism, the sociopaths. Some of them I truly believe are born that way. They’re the ones who make me question God, how could He have made them so? If such people can exist, does He?
The unity of spirit and flesh: we are our bodies. Not that we are only what is physical, what can be measured by senses and instruments, but that we don’t merely inhabit our bodies; we ARE them, or else why should it matter that the dead be raised? Why should God not have written our consciences, our sense of justice, our empathy not only on the non-material fabric of our soul, but into our very DNA? And yet that DNA is a mess in many ways. The sociopaths. The autistic.
Looking only at the physical, consider the sickle cell trait, a survival trait: for every two children who are more likely to survive malaria, one dies early and painfully from an ischemic crisis. Would God create like that? No, but evolution would. Or a Fall.
Dembski just came out with a new book about the Fall reaching backward in time as well as forward. I’ve had that idea myself; I’ll have to see where he goes with it.