[versteegen]

> I reconcile by concluding evolution itself may have been the thing that was intelligently designed

I don't understand why I don't hear anyone else take this position. To me it's obvious and it's hard to find any other way to reconcile them. (But I'm not religious.)

Well, actually there's two quite different things that could be asserted along that line and it's not clear which you meant: either that evolution is a mechanism by which the hand of God can meddle in random occurrences to pick outcomes, or that it's completely hands-off.

But I would state the second one differently: that the universe was set up to allow evolution and all the other systems of natures to create the world today. Evolution itself is ultimately a consequence of physics and statistics.