This is an intersting discussion, but it dodges the real issue. The main point of Genesis in not the creation or how it came about, but rather the separation of man from God through sin. According to Genesis, death entered the world through man's disobedience. If evolution is a fact, even if set in motion by an 'intelligent designer', then there had to be death in the world before man. If that is so, then sin becomes irrelevant as the cause of death, and the writer of Genesis is sadly mistaken. No sin, no need for a savior, and you end up with just another explanation for a secular origin, dressed up in a more palatable theory for the faithful.
For secularists, the concepts of sin and redemption must be expunged from our culture. To get Christians or Jews to accept that Genesis is wrong, when it is the basic platform on which rests our subsequent relationship with God, is the first and most important step in doing away with Judeo/Christianity altogether.
People of faith ought not be so gullible as to try to have it both ways: Either God is active and personally and intimately interested and involved in His creation, or He is not, and merely set the whole thing in motion and left the rest to chance. But it can't be both, IMO. Otherwise, prayer would be a waste of time, asking God to intervene in that which he has chosen to allow to follow it's own course.
(Of course, I could be full of crap, too!)
But there had to be death in the world for there to be life. Most living systems have something called 'programmed cell death' or apoptosis, which is an essential part of their metabolism. Programmed cell death begins in the first days of the development of an embryo. You couldn't live if some of the cells in your body didn't die to make room for other cells.