The Christian God is incompatible with evolution

First I would like to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as well as thank my opponent for initiating this debate. There are a couple of things I would like to first point out. The fact that God created is more far more crucial than how long God's creating lasted. The breath-taking splendor of God's creation isn't diminished if the process took billions of years rather than six 24-hour days. The heavens still declare God's glory. I'm firmly committed to Scripture's authority, and if commonly-accepted scientific theories genuinely conflict with Scripture, we should bow to Scripture's authority. The dispute about Scripture and science is often hermeneutical, however. One must distinguish between Scripture"s authority and our interpretations of it. The two "books" of Gods self-revelation "His Word and His world" aren't ultimately contradictory. Clearly, Genesis 1-3 is historical based on text such as Luke 3:38 and Acts 17:26. However, it has a number of non-literal/metaphorical elements as well not to mention poetic elements of terseness, repetition, etc. Some evangelical exegetes consider the early chapters of Genesis "poetical-historical." The biblical commentator E.J. Young, who believed God created in six literal 24-hour days, believed that Genesis 1 is poetical-historical language. "God "divides" light from dark, waters above from waters below, and sea from land. "There are metaphors (God "breathed" and "walked"). "There is poetic parallelism (1:27; 2:2) as well as poetically arranged strophes with "echo" and "re-echo ("God said"/"and there was"); these repeated refrains aren't exactly like a straightforward historical recounting. "We have light (first day) before we have heavenly bodies mentioned (fourth day). We have evening and morning (apparently) before we can have sunset and sunrise"for three "days". Consider how God forms Adam from the dust of the ground and breathing life into him; Job 10:8-9 tells that God created Job by his "hands'"but Job's conception and birth were typical and hardly unique. Unfortunately, many young-earthers have accused old-earthers of not taking the biblical text "literally" an often ill-defined term that fails to take genres and important literary features into consideration or that they are compromising with naturalistic evolutionists. But many careful evangelical exegetes such as Gleason Archer, Craig Blomberg, Craig Keener, Derek Kidner, Vern Poythress, Walter Kaiser, Bruce Waltke (to name a few) believe that the word "day [yom]" in Genesis 1-2 hardly entails a 24-hour time-period; the text is more generous than this. So we must take every portion of the Bible literarily ("each according to its genre") even if we don"t take every portion literally. Note too that if you take the "literal" (as opposed to literary) approach, one might think the Bible also teaches that: "the sun and moon are the largest heavenly bodies (Gen. 1:16); "the sun rises and sets (Gen 19:23; Deut 16:6; Ps 19:6); "the earth does not rotate (Ps 93:1); "the earth rests on foundations (Ps. 104:5); "the earth is flat/has an edge (Dan. 4:11, 22); "the moon is literally a "light" (Gen. 1:16; Ps. 136:7-9)"rather than a reflector. I will now move on to the scientific evidence for an ancient universe. The appearance of some celestial bodies millions or billions of light years away have been noted during recorded human history (e.g., Tycho Brahe's study of the 1572 starburst), which would undercut the allegation that all light beams were in place at creation. For example, on 23 February 1987, astronomer Ian Shelton photographed a supernova (an exploding star), whose light was 160-170,000 light years away. That is, the explosion took place 160-170,000 years ago, but its light only reach the earth in 1987 [1] [2]. But such an observation does not make sense if the young-earth creationist allegation is true. The Grand Canyon is another example of long processes over a long period of time"not a sudden global cataclysm. Rather than the higher layers being finer than the lower, we have a sequence of fine-coarse-fine-coarse; also, one should expect no multiple layers of limestone deposits interspersed with shale and sandstone layers [3]. There is good reason to take Noah's flood as affecting all humans, but regional in its extent (see Ross, A Matter of Days; The Genesis Question). As geologists Davidson and Wolgemuth note: If the Flood was violent enough to rip chunks of rock up from the earth and move entire continents (standard Young Earth claims), then it should be obvious that life forms from every imaginable niche would be tumbled and mixed together. We should find numerous examples of mammoths mixed with triceratops, and pterodactyls mixed with sparrows. Ferns and meadow flowers should be found in the same deposits, along with trilobites and whales. Further, we should find all major life forms still living today, for Genesis 7:8-9 is clear in stating that all terrestrial animals were preserved on the ark. What we actually observe is far different. There is an orderly sequence where trilobites only occur in very old rocks, dinosaurs in later beds, and mammoths in still later layers. Organisms like flowers and ferns are present together in more recent deposits, but only ferns with no flowers are found in older deposits [4]. The "Big Bang" about 13.7 billion years ago (the beginning of matter, energy, space, and time) "turns out to be an excellent confirmation of Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" [5]. Did God create with the appearance of age? It is also very strange that many young-earth creationists will say that the evidence for a young earth can be found only in Scripture via revelation, but yet declare that their belief is "now strikingly confirmed by modern science" [6]. If it is "strikingly confirmed by science," why don't more scientists--including evangelical Christians--recognize the evidence? God's creating the universe with the appearance of age is deceptive, and consequently, inconsistent with God's character. For the universe to give the false appearance of vast age when it is allegedly quite young flies in the face of reason. This apparent-age view implies that we while we can take the Bible at face value, we cannot take God's revelation in creation at face value. In the case of creation, God would be deceiving us by placing us within a complex world which bears innumerable indications of a complex history that did not actually happen [7]. If the universe is created with the appearance of age, then all we can say about all seeming-indications of pre-history as that they were created and bear only an illusion of history. It seems incredible to be able to trace the processes of history back to 10,000 years or so, beyond which time everything becomes apparently old. This strikes me as counter-intuitive. This renders all created rocks to be scientifically off limits. But the question is, "How do we determine that a rock could be older than 10,000 years? How do we decide that a rock may not be legitimately studied by the methods of geological science?." The appeal to the appearance of age essentially throws out the scientific enterprise [8]. In light of this assessment, it seems more in harmony with God's character and with our own common-sense intuitions that whatever "objects of [God's] creation we subject to scientific analysis will reveal their true age--provided the analysis is theoretically valid" [9]. [1]23 March 1987 Time cover story, "Supernova!" [2]The Evolution of the Universe, by P. James E. Peebles, et. al. in Scientific American [October 1994]: 53-64 [3] Davidson and Wolgemuth, "Christian Geologists,"5. [4] Ibid 6. [5] Paul Copan/William Craig, Creation Out of Nothing (Baker Academic). [6] Morris, Remarkable Birth, iv [7] Young, "Scripture," 300. [8] Ibid 301. [9] Ross, Creation and Time, 54