@martin, I agree with you that “tacking God onto something” can never serve a good purpose. My aim is to have God as the foundation of everything I think and believe. So tacking God onto anything cannot work if He is supposed to be my foundation. Therefore you don’t have to worry about that. Evolutionary theory will never be a guiding foundation for my life. So I do not need to “make” evolution true in any way and my faith is not in any way dependent on the scientific theory of evolution. Personally, it wouldn’t be any problem for me if sometime in the future there would be a number of huge breakthroughs that would show that thousands of scientists were seriously mistaken and evolutionary theory would turn out to be based on one humongous chain of errors. No problem.
I personally believe as strongly in “God spoke and it happened” as you. God’s Creation is unfolding according to His divine plan. So everything He declares to happen, will happen.
About “how” it happened, I consider it extremely probable that it occurred through evolution given what we know today. I could be wrong on that point, but given the evidence currently available in God’s Creation, I consider this a very safe position. Acknowledging this could have positive outcomes for the Church too. Most notably, if worldly people see that Christians are wise about earthly matters it can help them to trust us more regarding the important spiritual matters: salvation in Jesus Christ.
You see, I also believe that God’s character is to be coherent, honest, straightforward. His Creation is understandable, that’s a miracle in itself. God made the laws of nature and is upholding them as He wishes. Currently, the picture of a young earth does not correspond with all those logical principles that God upholds. If evolution and deep time would be wrong, God seems to have made a huge effort to make those things seem true. Such deceit just doesn’t seem to fit with God’s character as revealed in the Bible.
The most important problem I have with AiG is that they proudly claim to start with the conclusion that their specific interpretation of the Bible is absolute truth. Such perfect interpretation skills almost lifts them up to the level of God Himself… They start with their conclusions and then try to find reasons to uphold them. This is not how science works. They are different from you Martin. You have the openness to say “it could be true but I’m fine with just knowing that God spoke and it happened”. Maybe it helps you to be more critical towards AiG to know that here are many, many Christian scientists who completely see through the arguments they present.
Once I asked a young-earth creationist the following question:
“Imagine you end up in Heaven and God tells you that you were mistaken. Imagine that He tells you that the Earth is old and that He created mankind through evolution. He kindly explains you that the Scriptures were meant to transmit spiritual teachings, not cosmology… In that case, would you call God a liar for having inspired Genesis 1-3?”
The man in question was completely unable to answer this question. It appeared he was actually of the opinion of considering God a liar but couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud.
When AiG writers criticize any field of study in science, it’s very obvious to any expert that their claims are faulty. I know this from experience in my own field, astrophysics. Look I can imagine that for any non-expert reader it is difficult to assess those things. I guess it would help for you to focus very strongly on a single topic, instead of trying to grasp everything at once. Start with one claim of AiG and try to get to the bottom of it. Especially, read the arguments presented by actual scientists regarding that issue.