And you are illustrating exactly the sorts of backwards attitudes that give many religious conservatives a justifiably bad name.
If religious people want to believe in God they are quite free to do so. When they, however attempt to make laws for everybody else based on nothing more than a belief in God, they're going to get questioned. The morons in Tennessee
who are attempting to bring in intelligent design and creationism thru the back door by criticizing the chemical basis of life and evolution are an example of why biblical literalists don't mix well with science and logic, you know that post-Enlightenment stuff. Biblical literalists make claims about the world that are at best untestable and at worst demonstrably untrue. If they wish to step on the playing field of science with that junk, they're gonna get smoked. Again.
First, secular liberals are no different when it comes to their beliefs influencing law. They just don't do it under the banner of religion. Third, there's issues in the conservative cause (abortion, gay marriage, etc.) that can be supported without bringing religion into it. Third, while one shouldn't lump every religious person (including us Mormons) with the outspoken Evengelical types who misread the opening chapters of the Bible involving the creation, the secular science-is-our-god crowd seems to forget that science hasn't answered as many questions, or proved or disproved as many things as they like to think. They seem to forget the "theory" part in the "theory of evolution."
Science, not religion, is responsible for the lives we enjoy today. People who rant on about the theory of evolution and then turn to religious texts to try to disprove it show that they don't understand what a theory means in science. Gravity is also a theory. Religion doesn't have much useful to bring to the table when it comes to discussing evolution, the second law of thermodynamics, Huygen's Principle, superconductivity, chemical basis of life, Planck's law or any number of well tested scientific theories and facts.
So since conservative selective biblical literalists can't disprove evolution (or indeed any other scientific fact or theory) using scientific tools, they must inevitably turn to the state to attempt to strongarm their way into the scientific discussion. This makes about as much sense as someone who insists there is no such thing as gravity and the only reason we don't fall off the planet is God's love. Possible? Yes. Worthy of teaching or discussing in science class? Absolutely not.
Evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.-Stephen Jay Gould
