I've recently participated in a Christianity Explored program at a local church and came across the so-called 'leader's guide' ('facilitator's guide' or 'minister's guide' would be more Christian terminology, but, being Anglicans they're right into the 'leader-power' thing).
Much like the Alpha course, it contains a list of Questions about Christian Belief. Being Calvinists, they have trouble answering some questions, or at best, the answers are a tad lame; but being agnostic on creation, they duck and weave on the question of science and faith.
Quite rightly they pin down the real question: "hasn't the theory of evolution replaced creation and so disproved Christianity", but proceed to go all thumbs on the answers.
Tactically the line of answers is not too bad:
"Start by asking what they mean..." [always a good idea]
"Avoid a technical discussion..." [particularly if you are not skilled in the topic; but sometimes a 'technical' discussion is necessary to undo someone's rhetorical reliance on 'evolution']
"Ask what conclusion they are drawing from evolution." [another good one]
But it goes off the rails at a couple of points:
"How God made the universe is not as important a point as that he made it."
Even the average village atheist should be able to walk through that reply. The only information we have that he made it is the information about how he made it! The two are inseparable. If you deny that the Genesis account is factual, you deny the basis for claiming that God made it!
And who are we to claim that how is less important than why? The Spirit goes into significant detail as to events and timing to inform us as to the creation. And this is not important? It is only modern Western idealism, or a maneuver of theological equivocation that could think it credible to split the how and the why. For God, both are conjoined and march together, because God is not a bureaucracy. He is a unity of being, will and action.
Sundering the content and form of the creation account re-calibrates the Bible to meet the expectations of humanism with the obvious position being that the Bible has nothing of importance to say about origins. It follows that we defer to the 'world view' settings of the (empty) claims of materialists..the people whose basic belief is in dirt!
The other derailing 'answer' is to imagine that evolution does not answer the bigger questions. Well, no; it does answer them; that, in fact, is what it is all about; the putative scientific questions are trivial by comparison.
Their purpose is to give credibility to the world view of evolution: and it does tell about design, order and purpose. It tells us that design and order are merely human constructs on the inevitabilities of material behaviour, without significance beyond this, and that purpose is not a question with any meaning at all. Thus, we have none.
Evolution's biggest 'answer' and its orientating thrust is that material is basically real, and the personal is derivative.
The Bible's teaching is quite the contrary: the personal (God in the community of the trinity), indeed, loving community is basically real, and material is a result of loving intention!
