And yet God confirms that the unliving Earth brought forth life as He created it to do. You're selling God short; He is quite capable of making a universe that will bring forth life.
I recall a university student who'd never so much as opened a Bible before, when the study group he was in decided to read Genesis. When they got to where God told the land to "Bring forth!" this student's jaw dropped and he exclaimed, "That's evolution!" Of course what he meant was "That's abiogenesis", but my point is that an open mind encountering the first Genesis Creation account will have no problem with evolution because the beginning of it is right there.
[Of course that requires not counting the days as twenty-four hour, but given the literary type(s) of that first Creation account that's no problem.]
You've sold Him short, again. The evolution of eukaryotes was by endosymbiosis, the incorporation of cells within other cells in a functional relationship. Mitochondria, chloroplasts, and other organelles confirm this. Is there evidence that this actually happened? Turns out, there is. Jeong observed bacteria and amoebae to form an obligate endosymbiosis, to the point that neither cell can now live without the other. God is lot smarter than you seem to think He is.
That's one of the seven points a friend judged as being a step God provided; the first was life itself arising. IIRC the third was multicellularity.
BTW, this reminded me of an interesting case of forced evolution I read about in a grad school class called "Human Ecology". A forestry/wildlife ranger examining the territory of his new posting learned that there was an abandoned gold mine that had been poorly shut down, and the map showed a stream running through. He decided to take a look, and found that starting at a junction with another stream as he went upstream the stream from the mine had fewer and fewer animals, so he decided to take samples. It turned out that arsenic was leaking from the mine tailings, making the stream toxic.
Most of his water samples were sterile, but some taken near the stream junction -- both upstream and downstream -- had a number of bacteria. He thought about this and decided to do some experimenting. What he did was take the most robust sample from upstream of the junction, returned to its location, and scooped up a bucket of water. The water went into a small aquarium, to which he added plenty of material for the bacteria to thrive. After a week he then scooped half the water out of that aquarium and put it into another, this time increasing the arsenic concentration. There was a massive die-off in the new aquarium, but a tiny percentage of his microorganisms survived, and in a week's time had fully populated that aquarium -- at which point he repeated the process. I don't remember the number of iterations, but he eventually reached a point where the transferred population didn't survive even with the slightest increase in arsenic: his microorganisms were far more arsenic-tolerant than what he'd started with, but only so far.
Undiscouraged, he backed up a few aquaria and started a new line, in fact switching to quart jars so he could run several lines at once, trying to determine if some from the earlier population had a higher arsenic tolerance.
Skipping a bunch of futile attempts that showed no improved arsenic toleration, one say there was a difference: the population in one jar wasn't dying out! The population dwindled, then recovered, and one particular type of bacteria didn't just survive, it thrived. So he started a new line branching from that sample and started increasing the arsenic concentration to ever-higher levels. He found that die-offs stopped after a few iterations, so he kept transferring samples to new jars and increasing the arsenic concentration right up to where it matched that in the stream right below the mine.
Some of you probably recognize what happened: he'd bred a batch of microbes that was a lot more arsenic-tolerant than any in the stream, and then some mutation increased the tolerance to total immunity. But when he took his work to a university biology lab, they learned that something more had happened: that one strain of bacteria hadn't just become immune to arsenic, it was metabolizing arsenic!
I don't know if it was determined that he'd managed to prompt the development of a new species, but at the very least he demonstrated that mutations are not all bad, as some creationists maintain; here, at any rate, a mutation had given a species an ability none of its ancestors had had -- i.e. a new ability, built on new genetic information.
The Mississippi river system, a highly complex system that maintains drainage, valley systems, reconfiguration of channels and adaptation to climate change, was designed by no one. God merely created nature to do things like this. And you're still arguing that He can't.
Riverine geology was fun. From just a few simple rules, complexity emerges.
