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Our defense of evolution is occasioned by its present importance in biological science, and by the fact that it has been and is under extraordinary and ideologically motivated cultural assault. Apart from these factors, however, evolution is just another scientific theory...

I thought the general consensus amongst evolutionists was that it was a fact! In any case, explain briefly how evolution is important to biological science, for other than historical purposes?

Many creationists, OTOH, are essentially advocating "intellectual affirmative action".

I don't agree with affirmative action of any nature. I do not agree with creationism for reasons both scientific and biblical. The same for evolution. But I must admit it would be easy for me to believe in evolution if I was an atheist or (still) an agnostic.

Evolution is a fact. The mechanisms driving it are mostly facts. How it all works and comes together is the theory. Scientific theories are based on facts and are rigorously tested. Over years. Lots of years.

Your 2nd question regarding "what good is it" is one of those far reaching vague creationist type questions. Parts of the theory are used in everything from pharmaceuticals (too many to count) surgery, genetic studies (too many to count), agriculture, forestry, botany, on and on and on.

I thought the general consensus amongst evolutionists was that it was a fact!

No. The consensus is that there are both factual and theoretical aspects to evolution. The factual side would, for many, include things like common descent and faunal succession. Even creationists agree, in some cases or to some extent, that there are factual aspects. "Strict" creationists often attribute common descent to rather large groupings of organisms (e.g. horses, dogs, cats, weasels, etc) in part because they tend to be biblical literalists, and this makes for more room on the ark by reducing the number of "created kinds". "Progressive" creationists, OTOH, agree that fanaul succession is a fact.

Personally, I prefer a more restricted usage of "fact," where a scientific fact is defined as a "well confirmed observation." In that usage something like faunal succession (the claim that varying assemblages of species have inhabited the earth over time) would be an inference from facts, and the phenomenological aspect of faunal succession as found in the fossil record would be a law (a descriptive generalization of many facts).

All, I think, would agree that the explanatory aspects of evolution (the mechanisms, the why and how stuff, like natural selection) are theoretical.