I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and chalk that comment up to a misunderstanding of what I've posted rather than to an intentional backhanded insult. Please re-read my post considering the clarifications contained in this post.
It's never been my viewpoint that the Bible and science are in opposition to one another, and certainly not my intent to present that through my posts here. In fact, I believe the two are intimately entwined....
In re-reading my post, I guess I can see where you might get that interpretation though (wasn't that what we were just talking about anyway, interpretations?):
I believe that faith (general term, not just religious faith) is inherently important in what we hold to be true, whether those truths be scientific or spiritual in nature, primarily because we cannot absolutely PROVE anything. We can demonstrate that scientific laws are consistent in the present, but that does not give absolute proof that they have been and always will remain constant. As such, we have faith that these laws are indeed absolutely true. Similarly, we can demonstrate to ourselves that God exists based on a variety of evidence (personal experiences, observations in nature, etc.), but we cannot give absolute proof that He does. Faith is also required.
With that in mind, and knowing that by faith we accept Christianity as true, we accept as truth that we receive the Holy Spirit from God as part of our salvation experience. By faith, we believe that a very real Holy Spirit guides us to truth. If this is true, why then would we not allow our religious faith to help us form the basis of our scientific faiths as well? Prayer, meditation, Scripture reading... all should come into play in determining truth.
That being said, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that because we have faith that a certain interpretation of the Bible is true, we skew our science to support that belief. What I am saying is this (which is exactly what you stated, if I'm not mistaken): in instances where they do not agree, perhaps we should check our interpretation of one or the other. How does that apply? Creationists tend to check our interpretation of scientific evidence... Theistic evolutionists tend to check their interpretations of the Bible. Hopefully both sides are prayerfully allowing God's guidance to play a part in what they re-examine (of course that cannot be true, as that would mean God is contradicting himself, but we can't know absolutely which side corresponds to absolute truth..... but I digress).
Hopefully, this helps, but I'm afraid I've just muddied the waters further. We're already off-topic far enough, so let's try to get this back to phylaax's original question. A new thread would be appropriate if something we've gone off-topic about needs to be discussed further.
Anyway, on to my final request, one I'm repeating for the third time... Please post a link to an external website with detailed information from the Theistic Evolutionist viewpoint that addresses phylaax's original question. It's not that you're not doing a good job explaining, but simply that external sites contain far more information from both sides for the reader of this thread to consider than can possibly be posted within this thread. I have presented a link that could give hours of reading about the YEC viewpoint... for the sake of the reader who's undecided, a Theistic Evolutionist link with a similar amount of information is needed so both sides can be considered equally. I'll even post them together for convenience, if you'll just provide the link for the TE viewpoint (I would find one myself, but since I don't hold to that belief, it really wouldn't be appropriate as I could not accurately assess its characterization of that belief).
Anyway, that's enough for me for today.
