re: #933 Daria Emmons
I’ve trimmed your text:

Prayer itself is based upon the notion that God cares about mankind as a unique creature, apart from animals, enough to answer prayers and even alter the course of history to answer such prayers.

Rather, evolution proposes we are essentially an evolved animal.

I am not sure how someone could be a strong believer of the bible, with man’s special relationship with God, and then say that mankind evolved from animals.

I believe even the metaphoric message includes a notion that mankind is unique upon the earth and God answers prayers and cares about mankind.

I do believe there is a conflict in Genesis with the theory of evolution. This is why the theory of evolution has spawned such a controversy, and there are so many religious groups which fight against it!

I understand your argument, so please don’t explain it to me in greater detail—I think I summed it up fairly well by editing, no?

You are projecting your interpretation of others’ beliefs back onto those persons as limitations upon what else they might believe. People are more than capable of “holding” on one or more mental fronts to allow progress in others. Is it a particle or a wave? I don’t know, but I don’t have to resolve that in order to use implications from each model in understanding other things more clearly.
I use this example only as a specific incidence of the flexibility of human thought, and the absence of a need to absolutely resolve things before proceeding, and certainly not as any kind of physics/philosophy crossover, which I detest.
The account of Genesis certainly conflicts with other things, but it is possible to simply not resolve those conflicts, and carry on with other things. Like conducting research.
If the rigidity of thought and the well-developed logical sequences of beliefs you have implied were necessarily the way people think, then Christianity, indeed most religions, would be incompatible not only with evolution, but with science, democracy, and any form of decision making. Obviously, this is not the case. There is something which is incompatible with evolution, and that, for lack of a better term, we typically refer to a Young-Earth Creationism, and often just creationism for short.
Inherent in those labels are the understanding that we are discussing somebody who DOES see the Genesis conflict as irreconcilable, and therefore they move no further than that, except when perverting and corrupting other fields of inquiry to match that inflexible understanding.
But notice that nothing has been said of God here. Belief in God is compatible with just about everything, with I suppose the exception of the denial of God’s existence. Other factors which accompany faith, or which occur in the absence of faith; i.e., which have absolutely no relation to faith, are what make people unable to accept the straightforward arguments and clear evidence for evolution.
Ya got your YECs. Ya got your flat-earth Panspermians.
I suppose you’ll anger some of the faithful, because you are pigeonholing them, saying, “well, you can’t believe this and also believe this”, when clearly, they can and some do.