LOL…It’s no straw man. I am a firm believer in the danger of theistic evolution. You see it as a straw man, because, you see it as truth and even biblical 
Not so. Even from what little I know about evolutionary biology and the fact that there is diversity of thought amongst theistic evolutionists, I can tell that this article is full of straw men. There are dangers to theistic evolution, but this article only articulates a few real dangers; others are just silly.
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This is why I find it difficult to understand why strict Fundamentalists often see science (and especially the biological science that supports evolution) as a threat to Christian faith. Our increased knowledge of nature gives us a clearer understanding of the Inspired Truth that the OT writers were trying to convey using the language tools at their disposal more than three millennia ago. We now can see that ongoing creation (rather than one-time creation) requires death as well as new life. While each individual looks upon his/her mortality with some trepidation, to look at mortality from a Creator’s viewpoint (if we dare!) it is a necessary (and therefore good) requirement.
God may be truly transcendent, but in trying to “nibble around the edges” of understanding him, I believe that understanding evolution can be a great tool. Using evolution as a guide, we can reconstruct billions of years of the Earth’s history, observing from the fossil record an amazing parade of new life forms with ever increasing variety and complexity. While granting that the authors of Genesis were inspired, that is no good reason why we should not use our recently-acquired knowledge to increase our understanding (over what was possible for them) of a Creator’s View of our Universe–of what He might consider as good, and just , and moral. We humans have some sort of innate sense of what these qualities are, but it is all too evident that the evolutionary mechanisms that produced the first Homo sapiens left a great deal to be desired.
Perhaps the concept of Original Sin as the Fall from a perfect creation has gotten in the way of accepting the Truth that we teach our children in the Pinocchio fable. Like the little boy carved from wood, Pinocchio was not truly the son that Gepetto desired. He could fill that potential only after the fairy godmother presented him with a conscience in the form of Jimminy Cricket.
Are we humans, struggling with our evolutionary selfishness, trying to reach some potential goodness our Creator has in mind–are we not ln the same boat as Pinocchio? The Gift of Mind has allowed us to form powerful societies that dominate the planet. But is the Voice of our individual consciences being overpowered by a social conscience that seems to have lost its way sometimes? Can our Christian Faith, without cooperation from other faiths, bring the varied social consciences in line? Just food for thought.
Al Leo
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Clearly it is not referring to literal, physical death, since God said Adam would die on the day he ate the forbidden fruit, and yet he lived hundreds of years after that.
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@marktwombly, do you think dogs or cats “sin”? The usual response is that they don’t because they are not considered “moral” beings.
The Evolution of hominids is the progress of hominid intellectual power to the point where God says, “this being is now a moral agent… he/she is capable of sin.”
While I’m sure not everyone would agree with my model for this dilemma, to me Adam represents the first hominid capable of Sin. It is through this man that the emotional and cognitive tools necessary to be a moral agent is deemed present by God.
You should also note that there is nothing about Adam’s sin that prevented him from eating of the Tree of Life; even God said that he would do this.
So Adam’s sin did not change the universe or the Earth … Adam’s sin made it necessary for him to be expelled from Eden.
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Lynn, what I find intriguing about your comment is that you presume a literal interpretation of the word ‘day’. Do you presume that is the case in Genesis 1 also?
Biblically I understand death to mean both separation from God relationally - spiritual death - as well as it’s ultimate consequences in physical death. I believe that death started at the time he sinned and culminated in his physical death. Clearly at least the latter occurred because he is no longer with us.
I’m happy to take both figuratively if everyone else will, too! 
All flesh is mortal. Whether he had sinned or not, Adam would be dead today.
Because he sinned, he was expelled. And God tells us why… because he didn’t want Adam to eat from the Tree of Life and live forever.
I just got through reading this one at Creation:
What do you do with a person who seems so willfully determined to ignore dozens of areas of science and expertise?
If he isn’t intentionally misleading, then the obvious conclusion is that it really doesn’t matter what someone says about conflicts in the Bible - - a person can just conclude, whatever the Bible says Must Be Literally True.
Aw, man, now I want to go through it with a fine-toothed comb.
This contains the assumption that light must come from the Sun. Yet it says God made light on Day 1. The clear implication is that the plants survived on light directly from God before He made the Sun! 
Oh, absolutely. Because ancient civilizations were not convinced that the Sun was the only source of light. After all, the Sun can be behind a mountain… and the sky is still bright blue !
So why would do this? Why wouldn’t God make the Sun first? Because God didn’t explain any basic Cosmology to the writer of Genesis. The writer used God=Light as a First Principle; to have made the Sun the first principle would have been fairly pagan.
The Bible is not a book of natural science - - it is a book of theology pretending to teach metaphysical principles of existence.
How is this for serendipity? Just five minutes after your comment on Light from God, I stumbled into this reference to Thule in a book I was perusing for my research in the Celtic Church !
There was a geographic location that was called Thule, but the Celtic Church also recognized an Eden like place, further North, that you could not reach without God’s help!
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