I’m a Christian. Certainly that is where my values come from and where my opposition to abortion begins. I believe the Biblical creation story is as accurate as people at that time could understand. I also don’t subscribe to the dietary, grooming and countless other laws. Noah, like Job are for teaching difficult truths but are stories. The truths behind them aren’t any the less important.
I don’t believe God tries to trick us with the naturalist aspects of the earth. I have no firm opinion, however, on the Big Bang. The supernatural is in our mind and our being and must be approached through faith which is out of the realm of science or observation.
I don’t believe, however, in supporting factual misrepresentations in order to make thing simpler or more comfortable. There are a group of Atheists who approach their beliefs as fact and who are frankly evangelical. I think they are laughable, substituting religion with another religion. They can no more prove their ungod than I can prove my God. That’s where faith comes in.
I believe children are precious and must have the best of tools to take on their future world. That is why I oppose particularly young earth creationists. No one is permitted their own private set of facts.
That being said, I don't know many YEC college text books or professors:
Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism…
-Douglas Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology (1998, 3rd Ed., Sinauer Associates), p. 5
I have argued that the discontinuous gap between humans and 'apes' that we erect in our minds is regrettable. I have also argued that, in any case, the present position of the hallowed gap is arbitrary, the result of evolutionary accident. If the contingencies of survival and extinction had been different, the gap would be in a different place. Ethical principles that are based upon accidental caprice should not be respected as if cast in stone.wank•er noun \waŋ-kər\
- Dawkins
Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly.
1) No gods worth having exist.
2) No life after death exists.
3) No ultimate foundation for ethics exists.
4) No ultimate meaning in life exists.
5) Human free will is nonexistent.
- William Provine (from Darwin Day speech)