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Bill Nye, the self-styled "science guy," would also like to silence the half of the community teaching the scientific method who don't believe in anthropomorphic global warming.

He's a popular figure, but about as credible as a masked wrestler.

He's demonstrably harmful to all advocates of the scientific method.

There is no final conflict between facts, and Christians and "Sciencismists" are united by a belief that truth exists, though both also believe truth, on the level of natural order, can never be known exhaustively.

As a believer in Christ, as one who believes that Jesus Christ is who he was reliably reported to be, I do not pretend to know how much time passed between the first and second verses of Genesis. Bishop Usher's timeline is not sound doctrine, and it never was.

The distinction between those who believe Truth exists and can be discovered and those who think pursuit of final truth is vain is a much eeper chasm than the popular but false dichotomy separating Creationists and Evolutionists.

Both groups believe in a uniformity of natural causes, though their loudest proponents would be at pains to understand how this separates both groups from the majority of people living in darkness.

Christians believe in a uniformity of natural causes, but they do not believe it to be a closed loop.

That is the only, though very important, distinction between these two touchy groups fighting for state sovereignty.

At the heart of popular evolution is the prior assumption of a uniformity of natural causes as a closed system. That assumption is an article of faith.

That makes it a religion.

You are correct. Materialism (pure materialism) is better defined as metaphysical naturalism. The materialist must embrace (or more commonly avoid) First Cause of the singularity, the abiogenic development of first life, any abstract, invariant entity, logic, rational thought, consciousness....it cannot even account ontologically for numbers. To state that selection and genetic mutations did the work of creation and therefore is purposeless is to fail to see the flawed logic of such a worldview. It purports a 'scientific' explaination and ignores a philosophical conclusion. The empirical evidence is itself inadequate to prove the necessary creative power of natural selection without a boost from a philosophical assumption that only unintelligent and purposeless processes operated in nature antecedent to the 'developemnt' of intelligence. Darwinists know that nearly all phyla of plant and animal phylogentically developed and are represented in Cambrian strata,...that is to say life just sprung into being via selection and genetic changes (selected for), not because there is any evidence for it, but expressly because materialism excludes all other possibilities.

The conflict between Darwinism and theism is not that God could have used evolution by natural selection. The contradiction is at a deeper level. To know that Darwinism is true as a general explaination for the history of life one must know that no alternative to naturalistic evolution is true. To know that is to know that God does not exist, or at least God does not create. The statement, "God does not exist." is just as much a fact claim as the claim, God exists. So the materialist cannot have it both ways. If God does not exist, tell us how he knows that. Prove it beyond any reasonable doubt by metaphysical materialism claims.

Darwin's five main arguments for decent - neither fossil progression, biogeographical distribution, homology, embryological similarity, nor existence of rudimentary organs - establish common decent beyond any reasonable doubt.

The theory of common descent produces an admirable consilience. But that is just the point. Theories have the property of conscilience; facts do not. Consilience is a comparative notion, and the monophyletic view of biological history has not achieved greater conscilience than a polyphyletic view of biological history. Even invincible arguments from molecular homologies depend upon their efficacy for a priori certainties that similarity cannot be the product of common principles of design. Such certitude, it seems, has been acquired on the basis of naive dismissals of the metaphysics of others propagated by the Darwinist materialist's own metaphysical naturalism.