I am interested in how Christians who believe in theistic evolution feel about the Creationist/Intelligent Design element of the faith.
Excessively literalistic interpretations of Genesis inevitably pit faith against science, in regard to scientific questions. This is a battle that faith can't win and the result is lost credibility, especially among the more educated sections of the population who would be an asset to Christianity.
Moreover the attempt to force Creationism into science classes has aroused the anger of some of the world's most eloquent scientists. I am thinking of Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Surely your faith would be better off without such powerful detractors? Would it not be a better strategy to keep faith and science separate? To say nothing of faith and politics.
In addition these groups often present Christianity and science as mutually exclusive. Do you really want young Christians to have to make that choice?
The ID movement and the vocal anti-evolutionary stance of some sections of Evangelical Christianity seems to me to be a terrible miscalculation, that is damaging to all of Christianity. The press focuses on this radical fringe, making it loom much larger than it really is.
Do mainstream Christians see this? If they do why don't they do more to make the more reasonable voice of Christianity heard?
A battle that faith can't win? How so? What is the common measurement of both by which we can claim that science has the better of? Is it the number of people who will trust one over the other? If so, I couldn't care less about something so trivial. My beliefs are not determined by the majority opinion.
I personally see no problem with having faith and science together. The two cover entirely different subjects. Faith (in Christ) is centered on the Bible, which teaches us about spiritual, intangible matters like God, salvation, and the soul. Science is centered on the study of things that are tangible. Things that we can see, touch, hear, smell, or taste with our senses. There is not much room for overlap.
Many people make the mistake of assuming that a literal view of the Creation story is the only way to believe in it. Just because something is figurative doesn't make it false. What's important is what the story was meant from the beginning to communicate to us.
Was the creation story meant for the purpose of standing in the place of our scientific textbooks to tell us all the little details of how the universe came to be? I don't think so. In the context in which it was written, the enemy of Judaism was not science but pagan religion. According to pagans, there was a different god for everything. There was a god of the sun, a god of the water, a god of the earth, and so on. But what Genesis 1 tells us is that everything was created and sustained by a single God. It was not meant to tell us the order in which all of those things were created, or even how long it took for God to make those things.
I believe in the Bible 100%. I believe that it (as it was originally written) is without error. But I do not believe that the Young Earth Creationists believe about the first chapter of Genesis.
But hold on. I'm not a proponent of theistic evolution, either. I trust the Bible without question, but I find no reason to trust science so much. I have not substituted science for faith. Rather, I've purged the majority opinion out of my faith, which has led me to a middle-ground position on the subject. I do not believe that the age of the earth has any consequence on the validity of the Bible, and since the Bible does not explicitly say that evolution is true or false, it makes no difference to me whether we descended first from Adam and Eve or from some single-celled organism. Either way, we exist because God made us.