Gary - I understood that. What I'm trying to wrap my mind around is why there is so much heat from creationists about the possibility that evolution and religion can both be right. I understand why science types get frustrated when scientific evidence is brushed aside without due consideration. Why is it a problem to think that God used evolution as a tool?
I think part of the problem, especially with the young earth/flood geology types, is that they generally don't know much, if anything, about the origin and history of their own views. For instance most would be quite surprised, I think, to learn that all of Darwin's important contemporary opponents (the real "creation scientists") fully accepted an ancient earth, at most attributing only the most superficial sediments (the so-called "diluvium") to a global flood. Although even this was universally abandoned when a creationist and later Darwin detractor, Louis Agassiz, demonstrated that these were actually glacial deposits.
There were a few people around at the time that held views similar to modern flood geologists, but not one of these "Mosaic" or "Scriptural" geologists, as they were called, was a working scientist, even by the loose criteria of the early and mid 19th century. They were dismissed and debunked by the (creationist) scientists of the day who would later disagree with Darwin, the only difference being that Darwin was respected as a genuine and accomplished scientist.
Even the first "fundamentalists" were old-earthers to a man. I have a copy of The Fundamentals on my book shelf. All the essays touching on geology take an old earth view, and most are even neutral or accommodating toward evolution! Not one rejects the theory outright.
The young earth/flood geology view did not become popular again with conservative Christians for fully a hundred years, with the publication in 1960 of Henry Morris and John Whitcomb's book The Genesis Flood.
Something else most young earther's don't know is that Morris was largely cribbing (as he acknowledged in his History of Modern Creationism) from the real inventor of modern flood geology, George McCready Price, and also to some extent Price's associate Harold Coffin. Price developed flood geology in the 20's, but it never caught on.
Now for the real shocker. Price and Coffin did not invent flood geology to accommodate biblical literalism. Aside from the handful of insignificant 19th Century "Mosaic Geologists," this had never been a problem for Christians. Indeed Christian and creationist scientists developed modern geology, and anyway the bible seems to envision a tranquil flood which did little if any geological work (e.g. some of the same geographic names are used before and after the flood).
Price and Coffin were instead driven by extra-biblical literalism. They were both Seventh Day Adventists, and as conservative members of that sect they believed that the writings of founder and prophetess Ellen G. White were infallible and literally true. Whereas the Bible can be interpreted and accommodated in various ways, White could not. She wrote clearly and unequivocally that fossils were deposited by Noah's flood.
Now, Henry Morris was a fundamentalist and antievolutionist before he read (and later met) Price. His first book, That You Might Believe accommodated an old earth view. But for Price's belief that Ellen G. White was an infallible "prophet," a view that most fundamentalists would consider goofy if not heretical, it's possible Morris might never have become a convinced young-earther, might never have swayed so many other fundamentalists, and old-earth creationism might be the standard form of anti-evolutionism today, as it was for most of the last couple hundred years.