I would start by explaining that the TOE is not mutually exclusive of the claims of God or of the narrative in Genesis 1, 2 or the story of Noah.
It is not necessary to “prove” the existence of God. It is enough to prove that God can exist. Once this is done, those people who choose to seek God will find him.
Just because the TOE does not need God, that does not mean that God cannot exist if macro evolution brought about the species that we see today. Active Guidance is not disproved if directionless TOE can be proven to be workable. Ice cream does not need chocolate sauce. Proving that ice cream can exist without chocolate sauce does not preclude there being chocolate sauce on my Sundae. I would talk about sprinkles, but I don’t want to get too metaphysical here.
True, if the Christian is allowed to believe that the TOE may be directionless, he may choose to abandon his faith. That is his choice. That is just fine. It is God’s will that he have that choice. We know this from Genesis 2. God gave Adam and Eve the freedom to choose whether or not they would have the knowledge of what is good and what is evil. There was no fence around the trees in the garden. The serpent was allowed to enter the garden and tempt Eve and Adam. When Adam and Eve chose to know the difference between evil and good, they choose to be culpable for their actions. Given that choice, each of us would choose the same. Once we are culpable for our actions and able to make moral choices, we by necessity need to live in a world where moral choices are possible. We by necessity need to live in a world where wrong choices can be made. We by necessity need to live in a world where there are challenges to be overcome through perserverance (a series of right choices). We require the freedom to choose to follow God or not. We require the freedom to believe in God or not. This is all part of God’s plan, as revealed in his book. Specifically in Book 1, chapter 2. The story of the Garden of Eden is not the story of creation. The story of Eden is the story of a garden, where God proved to us that we are responsible for the challenges and unfairness of life, and that God is just and good and fair by providing us with just such a world. This is true even when the most unbearable seeming things happen to people undeserving of such fate, and it is by adopting an eternal perspective and faith in God’s perfect outcome that we gain the ability to weather those tragedies.
So, your goal is well intentioned, but it is not God’s will. It is not God’s will that you create a formula using ID that will make it impossible for someone to reject belief in God. it is God’s will that we have the freedom to reject him or not. Someday every knee will bow and every tongue confess, but not right now.
Contained within the Bible, there is the truth of the universe. Unfortunately, we are sometimes not able to interpret correctly what we are reading in the Bible, and therefore we make mistakes. This is not because the Bible is fallible, this is because we are fallible. The traditional interpretation of the first two books of Genesis is incorrect. Again, this is not because the Bible is fallible, this is because we are people and we are fallible.
A riddle. The bat flew through the air. What is the bat made of? Hmmmm. The bat could be a furry rodent that flies. The bat could also be a baseball bat and made of wood. There is no way to know without context.
In English, the word “bat” can have more than one meaning. In Hebrew, there were many different meanings for each noun. Ancient Hebrew was noun poor. There are three words that we are concerned with when reading Genesis 1 and 2 and the story of Noah. Erets could mean the world, or it could mean “land”. Yom could mean a day or it could mean a long period of time. Har could mean mountain, or it could mean hill or an irrigation dike.
The word Yom cannot mean “day” all the way through Genesis 1, because we do not see the sun until day 4. The word Erets cannot mean the word “world” in both Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 because Genesis 2 is clearly the story of the creation of a Garden and not the story of the creation of the planet. Genesis 1 is the story of the creation of the planet. The word Har cannot mean mountain in the story of Noah when it describes the mountains being covered in water because the evidence of a global flood is provably false. There were lots of little floods and lots of slow continental drift. The word Erets cannot mean world in the flood story because there was a local flood, not a global one.
Genesis 1 does not tell us the method by which God created the earth. Genesis 1 tells the order of major epoch’s and milestones in the creation of the planet and orders them by the order in which these processes began.
Here is my interpretation of Genesis 1
The smoking gun for evolution in the Bible is that Genesis 1 puts plants before the creation of the sun, moon and stars. If we interpret the creation of the sun moon and stars to be the visibility of the sun, moon and stars through the clearing atmosphere after the “great oxidation event” then that means that the Bible is claiming that the creation of plants was set in motion before the great oxidation event. The great oxidation event was caused by the respiration of photosynthetic cyanobacteria. some of these same bacteria became chloroplasts when they took up residence in host cells and this led eventually to the evolutionary development of plants. Evolution is completely compatible with the Bible. In Genesis 1 God announces that he is going to create something and then the next verse or two state that God created. The verses do not explain how God created, they just say that he did.
You can go all through the Bible and not find anything that specifically contradicts that God used evolution as the process to create mankind. God made Adam out of dust and breathed life into him, but Adam is a special case made through special creation to prove God’s point about the culpability of humanity for our actions.
more biblical support for old earth
Here is a link to the the first in a series of posts where I go passage by passage and explain that the verses traditionally cited to support YEC do not actually support YEC. Similarly, these passages do not contradict the Active Guidance that God used to lead the development of life on earth. Therefore the TOE and the Bible are not mutually exclusive if one allows for Active Guidance. It is true that one is left with the option of disbelieving that God directed the process, but it is God’s will that people have that choice to make. Going against that is going against God and therefore wrong. You have to allow people the freedom to make that choice. Interestingly YEC takes that choice away from people by demanding that people believe in something that is demonstrably neither true not biblical.
explanation of scripture
The bible does not contradict the TOE as long as one allows for Active Guidance. People have the freedom to disbelieve in Active Guidance if they choose. It is God’s will that people have that choice. Do not contradict God’s will.