"We can believe or reject evolution, it doesn't matter, the church has no official position."

i've been recently messaging back and forth with a somewhat brainwashed and non-rational mormon who goes by the youtube username TheSkepticChristian (NOT!). he wrote the following claim to me:

"We can believe or reject evolution, it doesn't matter, the church has no official position."

and a personal-christian contact of mine on facebook wrote something similar to me today:

"I am rather conflicted because of understanding both views (atheism and Christianity)."

here's my response:
evolution by mutations, genetic drift and natural selection and the literal, young earth, old testament creation by YHWH are mutually exclusive models.

furthermore, a key element of natural selection is death, (the survival of the fittest). according to the old (genesis 2:17) and new testament (romans 5:12), death was introduced with the fall about 5800 years ago. according to the current model of evolution, we are but one of millions of interrelated species. the old testament tells us that we're not related to any other lifeform on earth whatsoever, but that we are created in god's image and are his children and he is our father.

an exmormon named chulotc (on exmormon.org) responded to me with the following:

When I was a kolobian it was easy to rationilize evolution and maintain my core belief system. Elohim organized matter which already existed (preserving thermodynamics), that matter coalesced into stars, supernovae, smaller stars, planets, moons, etc.

The conditions were such that biological life manifested and eventually evolved into higher primates, two of which elohim placed in a garden and put kolobian spirits into.

wherein i responded:

the problems with this are that the book of genesis claims:
1) adam was the first man, the father of humans.
2) YHWH created adam from the dust, he wasnt an evolved, living man, plucked from a group of other living men and put into a garden of eden. he didnt have a homo sapien father and mother and neither did eve because YHWH created eve from the rib of adam.
3) adam was immortal to begin with and death entered the world after eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
4) creation of animals and man happened on different "days" or iterations, whereas with evolution, homo sapiens and animals (and plants, etc) have been evolving side by side in one long continuous process.

then there's the anachronism in genesis 1:1-5 that the earth was created *before* the sun and then in verse 16, that the stars (the rest of the universe) were not created until the fourth day, long after the creation of the earth and sun.

according to nasa, about half the stars in our milky way galaxy alone are older than our sun.