Hello to those who have been here a while

Hi all,

I am a 3rd year Population Genetics PhD Student, who, owing to upbringing, has a background in Creationist/Intelligent design argumentation, owing to careful though, study, & conviction, is a fairly down the line traditional Christian, and owing to quite a few years of scientific enquiry, is an evolutionist (but not purely a naturalist, and not dismissive from a presuppositional stance of the possibility of divine involvement in the history of the cosmos).

To the extent I come back around here over the next few months, my goals are loosely as follows:

1. Review the 'interesting parts' of creationist positions that I picked up growing up, & think through them critically, but sympathetically, from the perspective of later study and understanding (both scientific and theological)
   
2. 'steelman' both creationist and scientific argumentation (based on my conviction when I was younger that there is a real intellectual poverty in most mainstream efforts to engage with positions
   
3. Take those who interact seriously, but not uncritically. In particular, I UTTERLY REJECT the stance of many mainstream debaters on this issue (on either side) who think that discussions of origins should be fundamentally approached as part of broader political culture wards, whether that be forcing through (or suppressing) school content, hunting out dissidents & eliminating them from positions, etc.
   
4. At times and places, explore my own ideas of the intersection between science & Christianity, including (on occasion) some sharp criticism where I see current naturalistic science to have overreached, especially on the philosophical front, and especially examining the argumentation around attempts to restrict the domain of scientific (but really, broader human) inquiry into the realm merely of naturalism. And chase down the consequences of this either way.
   
5. I will also be interested in the sections of this that touch on scriptural interpretation, where I believe many commentators are simply lazy and allow their own prejudices to blind them towards what are quite nuanced approaches to reality by ancient writers.

More in future (wherever and whenever I have time and inclination)

Topics I will discuss early on:

1. The boundaries of science and pseudoscience, especially how these get politicized
   
2. Sanford's "Genetic Entropy (updated edition)" - it touches on my specialty field
   
3. Meyer's "Darwin's Doubt"
   
4. Gould's "Structure of Evolutionary Theory"
   
5. The ways in which the creation/evolution debate has impacted the evaluation of the relative legacy of Wallace and Darwin (and why I think Wallace is underrrated)
   
6. The panentheistic beliefs of certain early population geneticists
   
7. Gustave Malecot as a pivotal and underrated population geneticist "first-born child of population genetics" who was also a French Christian Protestant (& highly committed)
   
8. A discussion and critique of the 'economy of miracles' arguments made as part of the RATE project
   
9. Why the problem of mind is much more serious that popular evolutionists would have you believe.
   
10. A broader, explicitly theistic, framing of intelligent design theory as a kind of non-naturalistic mode of natural inquiry/philosophy, and how it avoids many of the issues of the attempted secular version