Hi Paul, a couple of things.
First, I believe in the Genesis account of creation, but I must admit, there many holes in my understanding of it. I do believe that the earth appears much older that 10,000 years. I do believe that dinosaurs existed. I don't understand how snakes can talk, or even what state that Adam & Eve were actually in at the Garden, i.e. immortal or mortal (purpose of tree of life).
My point is, i can appreciate the controversy and confusion. Again, i am a Biblical literalist, I believe implicitly with the Genesis account of creation, 6 24 hr days. But, there is a deficiency in my understanding, because I cannot explain some of facts that I pointed it. In short, I believe that God created everything with age. Man was created not a fetus, but full grown, same with the first animals and plants, and the earth and all it's environments too. All were pre-fabricated in a mature state. The rest, still working on...
Second, sometimes it's good to give people enough rope to divulge their true sentiments. This is the point of free-will, and the lack of forced censorship upon man. We are to grope for him on our own accord, un-coerced and zealously. Thus, God permits such perversions and deceptions, and even temptations, to expose the heart. When no crisis, no one knows who their true friends are. Same with God, no controversy, everyone appears innocent. If the tree of good & evil was not prohibited, do you think Adam & Eve would've ever considered themselves to be transgressors? Or the Apostles during Christ's passion, they swore that they never betray Him. Crisis and controversy expose a great deal about one's heart.
Up until the time of Darwin's theory it was a settled fact that God created the universe and the world in 6 days as stated in Genesis 1. By the way, did you know that the world, surrounded by water, was created before the sun, moon, stars, and galaxies according to Genesis 1. Evolution says that the cosmos started with a big bang and the world formed after it. So there is a big difference between evolution and Genesis 1 for a start.
I think that the fairy tales associated with evolution and other creation theories that ignore God has muddied the waters in the secular world and the church. What is sad is that church pastors, leaders, and Sunday School teachers have taught versions of evolution and has muddied the waters for many Christians. This is the reason why you are confused, and why multitudes of 20-25 year olds, brought up in Christian homes and church are walking away from churches and becoming atheists because they have lost confidence in their church mentors who have failed to teach them how to counter the evolution theories that are bombarding them at elementary, high school, and university. Because of the church's failure, they cannot give a definitive Biblical and scientific answer to the questions, and so they give up trying and take the attitude that the Bible no longer has any authority for them, and that anything goes hence we have homosexuality, abortion, casual sex, and every other godless practice in society.
The issue is that there is an attack on the authority of the Bible. The very first attack was on Eve, when the talking snake (possible, because Balaam's donkey talked to him about the angel with the sword in their path) asked Eve, "Has God really said?" sowing a doubt in Eve's mind as to whether God's word was really true - that she would die if she ate the fruit from the tree. Then the snake implied that God was lying to her when it said, "You will not die, but become like God, knowing good for evil". So, when people move away from the authority of the Bible, they become their own gods with the right to decide for themselves what is good or what is evil for them, instead of trusting God's Word.
So, the arrogant guy with the big nose who sang "It ain't necessarily so" in the nightclub that I visited in the late 1960s, was just repeating what Satan, through the talking snake originally said to Eve. So, Satan is still attacking the authority of the Bible when he inspires people to ask questions like, "Was Adam and Eve real people?", "Was there really a global Flood?", "Was the world really created in six 24hr days?", "Was Jesus Christ a real historical person?".
By the way, I am shocked at professing Christians who disagree with Jesus and Paul when they definitely refer to Adam and Eve as real people who existed from the 6th day of creation. I just wonder what kind of christianity do they believe in? The minister of a liberal church preached on the Samaritan woman and he said that the living water that Jesus spoke about was for the healing of racism between different races of people, using the example of Jesus a Jew talking to a Samaritan woman. This is a sad example of a Satan-inspired twist of Scripture being fed to uninformed people in churches today.
By the way, there are no races of people. We are all of one family, parented by two original parents, making us one human race. The differences are genetic and cultural, and no one is absolutely white or black. We are all different shades of brown, depending on the genetic adaptation of where our ancestors were situated, and how much resulting melanin was in their skin. There is no interracial marriage. When we marry, we are marrying a relative! Actually, incest was not made a violation of the law until Moses. This was to prevent deformities in offspring due to the degradation of the genetics through multiplied copies. We can see this when we used to do copies of VHS videos. Each copy was not as perfect as the one before, and after a few copies, the result looks almost out of focus. We see this when we are watching a news bulletin involving a video clip of a 1960s event and it appears to be very low definition when the original might have been high definition. Old movies on Youtube, if they are copies of copies of copies, can have that same fuzzy, out of focus appearance.
Actually this is another good evidence of man not being around for thousands of years, because if people were intermarrying close relatives all that time up to the time of Moses, then the genetic degradation would have been much more pronounced and many more deformed offspring would have occurred than was actually the case. Marrying a close relative with the basically the same genetic code causes the multiple copies of the same code because of the absence of any previous differing genetic elements that have been lost. This is why problems occur with closed communities intermarrying. What is needed is a greater range of people with more genetic elements so the problem of copying similar elements is eliminated.
At present it is legal for cousins to marry, but as time goes on, it may become necessary to outlaw even that through further degradation of the genetic elements between them.