survival fitness is the selection criterion for evolution, not for survival fitness as that would not make sense. The selection criterion for survival fitness is the ability to stabilise the system against random interference like asteroid impact. As a system it is networking with sufficient redundancy that you can survive is one or even several nodes are destroyed. So we better work on our ability of leaving this planet before we make it collapse.
As the extraterrestrial said
The humans appear to be a lifeform so stupid that they developed the skills to blow up their planet before they had ensured that they had sufficient escape pods 
Not for me. If the human mind was the desired outcome, anyway. The chain of events leading up to it would be the most amazing display of falling dominoes I’ve ever seen. Far more majestic than making a mannequin out of clay and performing CPR on it. Squaring it with scripture is where I struggle.
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I could understand if a child interprets Genesis as God making mud pie humans, but for a grown up one should be able to go beyond that level of interpretation an recognise the poetic description of reality that Genesis represents. It describes evolution in a way that is understandable to children, the illiterate and the intellectuals alike.
To think of God as a Yoda like magician that puts every molecule in place by hand and lets the animals appear with abracadabra in a puff of smoke is sufficient for some, but not if you want to understand Genesis at a scientific level.
If you want to understand a metaphysical God that spoke reality into existence you have to think of words of love and logic that control the movement of energy and matter that form our reality. It is that feature that is life in its essence that is what we are part of.
To the old OP.
@MattReam, I feel for you. With you. I’ve been, I am, on a homologous journey. Our fundamentalist, grammatico-historical fairy tales are comforts of the nursery, of institutionalization: prison. And these childish things have been ripped away from us. The wisdom of age is the realisation of loss. As the ancients - Aeschylus - and Bobby Kennedy knew.
“[He who learns must suffer.] Even In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God - To tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”.
God is not God. Not our three to two thousand year old evolved story of Him, even with incarnation.
He is far greater, more complex, more subtlte than that. He is the ground of infinite, eternal physical and transcendent being. And He is helplessly immanent within the physical. I love kingly imagery, majesty, who doesn’t? That’s us helplessly yearning up.
Yearning with you - Martin
I’ve said it before somewhere. I say it often online and in person. But to me evolution is a creation that keeps on creating. Something God set into motion at some point that continues to showcase new creations. To me that’s way more beautiful that a creation that was created all at once and with the exception of some small change sis roughly the same forever.
This may be a crude example but it’s metaphorical and not literal.
Imagine if you created flour, sugar, and milk.
In one scenario that’s all there ever is. Those thing. They don’t change.
In the second after making those things and placing them into existence you jump forward millions of years and you see those few simple ingredients have become cakes, cookies, cupcakes and many other things. Additionally you see that those things have become cherry flavored, chocolate, vanilla, pumpkin spice and all kinds of tastes. You also noticed you have some that are simply designed and some that are so majestic it’s a focal point in big ceremonies and that there are so many mysteries locked away in them that people specialize and have hobbies just centered around them.
To me that second view is a creation that keeps creating and is way more lovely.
Law constrains God. It’s an intrinsic, inseparable, unavoidable aspect of His nature. Logos. If He does not exist, it’s still there. Because we exist. Logic, mathematics, their realization in physics and on up to morality are not arbitrary and are independent of God who instantiates them all, has to instantiate them all, if He is.
We have two somewhat different things here, Law and Logos (Reason.) They see different because we see Law as external, while Reason is internal. The Law tells us what we should do. That is an external constraint from God. Reason informs us what is rational and we are motivated to do to what is rational.
We at times may have a conflict between the Law from God and the Logos/Rational from our Mind. God does not have this problem because the Sources of the Law is the Father/Creator and the Logos is the Son/Logos. In other words the Trinity reconciles the Law and the Logos, and it does so through the Spirit. The Law is based on the Logos and fulfilled through the Spirit.
God uses the Law to inform humans the best way to live. There are serious consequences for telling lies, just as there is serious consequences to violating the laws of gravity. The point as found in John 1:1 is that the laws of nature are built into nature, which means that God the Creator created all things through God the Logos. they are all One even if they are different.
That is how we know that God the Trinity is. Because Reality is wondrously Many and wondrously One we know that God is Real. God the Father reconciles all things to Godself through the Logos and the Spirit.
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