How to argue with an Evangelical?

[TJ in Oregon]

As for the argumentative tactics, I can't help you much there other than to try and calm the person down and make sure you let them hear you out as you argue. Remember, any time you are in a religious argument, your aim should not be so much to win the argument but to make them understand your position very well. People are far more often convinced by slowly warming to a view than by getting defeated in a shouting match. You want to make them understand because they need to understand before that can begin to see that the argument is true.

As for evolution and biology, I would say the short answer is that the creation story in Genesis is literally true only in the elements of it that were meant to be taken literally. Not all of the Bible was intended to be literal; it has tons of metaphors, parables, and symbols. The key elements of the creation story that are should be taken literally are that God created man and woman "in his own likeness" (ie. with a rational component), gave them free will, and that humanity exercised its free will to fall. The Bible is extremely important, yes, but do not forget it was written by humans and that particular part was written by humans who lived centuries after the described events. It is also quite likely that the authors then would not have anticipated the gravity given to details they may have considered unimportant.

More broadly, a mutual belief in both faith and science (by this I particularly mean hard sciences) does require a self-consistent universe and given that framework we should not expect our religious views and scientific findings to contradict each other. If they do, that ought to be a sign that our understanding of one or the other is mistaken in some way. Some folks like to say that science answers questions of "how" and religion answers questions of "why"; I would agree most of the time but also think that saying is more an accident of language than anything else. Science answers questions that can be tested via falsifiable hypotheses. It does not necessarily follow of course that only falsifiable hypotheses can be true and it also doesn't follow that whatever the current theory is is true. However, in the case of evolution, the evidence we have a very substantial and cannot simply be ignored, nor can it be argued away. The alternatives from the religious point of view are something along the lines of God creating the world and humans from nothing with partially decayed fossils already in the ground or something of that sort, which is plausible but also not the conclusion anyone will reach from science alone. Few people also will accept that argument from the Bible's self-evident perfection either, since it is also uncertain exactly which parts are intended to be taken literally. I would also caution as a fellow Christian that there is a significant danger in using the idea of God as an explainer of the the unexplained (a so-called 'God of the Gaps') because it runs the risk of destroying faith as people explain the previously unknown. It is important to see God instead as a prime mover who creates all, including science, and that simply because something can be explained by science does not mean it does not come from God, nor does it mean that same thing cannot also be explained by God.