@cwilbur – I agree with your underlying point. My ultimate answer to the question “why” is “there is no reason, it was a freak random occurrence”. This is much less friendly and warm-fuzzy-feeling giving than “God made it happen.” I accept that coldness. In fact, I take comfort in it, even more so after being introduced to the character The Comedian from The Watchmen. Once you figure out what a a joke everything is, being the Comedian’s the only thing that makes sense.
The reason I take steps to distinguish religion from science is due to religion’s past persecution, denial, and dismissal of science. No one would have thought up the DNA sequence simply by reading the pages of the Bible, it required tons of work and effort and theorizing and contemplating to get there. And some people who did such work were persecuted for going against the teachings of the Church.
It is nicer hearing of such things such as the Pope supporting evolution. Again, it does relate back to your point, evolution is not necessarily the why, but it is the how. Maybe the Church was scared of science finding the how and thus the Church being somewhat discredited or hindered at least. I mean, let’s be honest and real here, the Church is a huge organization that wields/wielded a lot of power, and such organizations never want to willingly give up power.
However the statement “god made our DNA” is not representative of the science/religion duality of how versus why. If evolution is to be believed, then DNA occurred via natural selection over millions of millions of years. Thus a more appropriate sentence would be “evolution made our DNA into what we are, but God started the ball rolling”. And then of course we start trickling back and back until we are at the start of the cosmos and at the start of this question again. :)