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"It's a historical fact that reading Copernicus' book would earn you death at the hands of the Church."

Now I'm having quite a bit of difficulty believing that the entire Church advocated putting people to death for reading the book.

link?

It's a historical fact that reading Copernicus' book would earn you death at the hands of the Church.

Perhaps you can provide some evidence for that "historical fact"?

Copernicus was a Catholic priest. AFAIK, he was never tried for heresy, or even formally accused of it.

The whole Church did not, but the leadership did. Here's an example of a link.

http://filer.case.edu/sjr16/pre20th_europe_church.html

"The book was published in Latin, so the general public was not able to read it. Academics could, but few learned people were willing to face the Church and risk death. It wasn't even until 73 years after it was published, 1616, did the Church consider it important enough to place on its Index of Prohibited Books."

There are plenty more. I'm not sure you're understanding my point, though.

My point is simply that it's easy to interpret certain passages of the Bible to speak to scientific matters, but there are also interpretations of those passages that do not necessarily conflict with science. The Church takes a traditionalist approach. It assumes that its traditional interpretation of the Bible is the only possible one, and therefore that evolution is inconsistent with the Christian faith. It makes that assumption, just as it once made the same assumption in connection with the notion that the Earth is the center of the universe. Ultimately, that particular position was disproven to virtually everyone's satisfaction, and of course, the Church now claims that the Bible is not inconsistent with the notion of a sun centered solar system, despite the traditional interpretation that prevailed at the time of Copernicus.

So if it's so easy to reinterpret these passages in the Bible, then why do they take these unyielding positions in the first place? Especially on matters that are not central to the Christian faith?

Stick to the basics--Jesus Christ and Him crucified. You don't need to rebut the scientist's version of evolution in order to get to that point, and popularizing the idea that you can't be a Christian if you believe in evolution is not a good strategy to win souls.