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The little jibes get tossed in as efforts to marginalize and thus ignore anything that might, MIGHT, point to a more complex explanation of what the whole Universe is really like. It is far easier to criticize a narrowly framed image than to consider what might be plausible in the larger image being rejected.

Ah, but there's the rub, dear brother in Christ: It seems to me that Darwin's theory requires the rejection of the "larger image." If Darwin's theory is seen as premised in methodological naturalism, the "larger image" cannot be captured by the methods that mindset or predisposition imposes: the presupposition that all causes in Nature are natural causes (i.e., material and/or physical, local causes whose instantaneous results are susceptible of observation, technically augmented as necessary).

Also final causes are banished from methodological naturalism, because they appear to act "from the future," and this cannot be.

And yet a biological function really cannot be described without reference to an end, purpose, or goal — that is, a final cause.

Aristotle further clarified that the final cause is the cause for which all the other causes in Nature — formal, material, efficient — exist in the first place. It is a peras, a Limit, without which nothing could be as it is, or reason even be possible.

But I disgress. To get back to the main point, if, on the other hand, Darwinism is seen as premised in metaphysical naturalism, it seems to me it turns Nature into the "god." The Judeo-Christian God is simply banished. This is definitely a religious attitude, though a rather perverted one, to my way of thinking.

Why one would assume that God must be evicted in order for science to be conducted properly flies in the face of human historical reality. Such great scientists as Newton and Einstein (among many others) were motivated by ideas of the divine, of the transcendent; and many great scientists were even in religious orders — e.g., Gregor Mandel ("father" of genetics) and Georges LeMaitre (who "discovered" the Singularity).

I believe you are surely right, dear brother in Christ, to point out that our concepts respecting time dimensionality are still very crude:

...the true dimensional reality of the Universe God has created is from one perspective much more complex than 4D spacetime, while from another perspective far more elegant in process than we have yet to discover. As an example, I would point to the notion that gravity in our 4D continuum may be a shadow effect of a force manifesting in a fifth or sixth dimensional continuum. The deposition of certain crystalline structures hints at this 'higher dimensions effecting' (kind of like a precipitant) our 4D spacetime.

Along those lines, I think you'll enjoy this article: Time as an Illusion, by Paul. S. Wesson. It's one of the most thought-provocative scientific papers I've read in recent times.

Thank you so much for writing, MHGinTN!