Both are faith based responses to questions we cannot answer any other way. Getting caught up in absolutes thinking your interpretation is the gold standard is a sign of an unrefined critical thinking process.
(Funnily, physics have come to acknowledge the same, but they call it dark matter and say it’s all very scientific, whatever it is. But this is unknown enough to be not worth much discussion.)
Regarding the evolution we see around us all the time, I and many creationists besides me have full confidence in the idea that micro-evolution does occur. That there is a stochastic gradient decent process that hones in on time-varying local maxima over generations cannot really be denied. But that provides absolutely no answer to the questions of abiogenesis and speciation en-masse.
I will say all of science is based on faith- the faith that the human mind can perceive the universe as it truly is, using rational thought and experimental data collection. For some reason this really bothers some scientists and they like to treat science as an unquestionable objective truth, but realistically, we can't exclude any number of hypotheses, but merely state them as improbable based on our understanding.
We can certainly say that the observations look like they may have progressed at the rate we expect for the past 13 billion years, but that does nothing to exclude the possibility that around 6,000 years ago some actor we do not understand took 1 week to craft everything we observe now to be precisely how it is.
Reading your final paragraph, I believe we are more aligned than I previously thought. :)
That said, it is very rare that I hear someone describing themselves as Christian who denies the general 7 day creation story. I happen to personally believe it was seven consecutive days^, but I've heard arguments it could have been seven days with an unknown gap in-between each pair.
^ "day" being the most morally-understandable way of describing the intervals at which the creation occurred. Obviously there was no sun or even light at first, so the concept of a day itself is shaky, and I make no claims as to how many cesium-133 transitions may have occurred in that period, or how far light might have travelled in one of them once it was created, or the magnitude of the various fundamental forces' impact on matter in that period, or really anything related to our understanding of how the dynamics we currently observe may have behaved in those intervals.
But how much of the world's resources have been dominated by folks placing their faith in Eru Ilúvatar?
And I'm sure you're aware Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and described his works as fundamentally Catholic?
Both are theories about the world. 'Creationism' as a theory really only became pure faith very recently as most specific claims attributable to it have been disproven or better explanations have been found. For a long time it was a perfectly cogent theory.
Not to mention, anything I present as being evidence of intelligence being more able to produce functional complexity than randomness you would reinterpret as "randomness-that-produced-something-that-look-like-intelligence producing functional complexity better than randomness-that-doesnt-look-like-intelligence".
You don't have to take evolution on faith. You can write a computer program that demonstrates that selection among almost-but-not-quite identical entities with heritable properties generates adaptive forms. Many people have.
DNA is real. Reproducing lifeforms are real. We know how they work in some detail. There's no faith required.
Accordingly, if we take a definition of "explain" which does not assume a particular interpretation of the fundamental axiom (as we should, when that axiom is the very thing under debate), my statement is perfectly valid: That actor which we cannot fathom made it so. Thus, it is.
How so? For that to happen you'd need to have the usual "evolution-is-science-and-creationism-is-religion-which-denies-science" stance, no?
There are creationist scientists, there is "creationism-proving", or at the very least allow "creationism-compatible" evidence in science, and so on. Let's reduce it even more, science hasn't been able to disprove Creation.
Believing "God did it" should not invalidate science, wanting to understand more, and actually making experiments. On the contrary, it should encourage it, as it did with many scientists who, in a way, brought us to where we are.
And as other commenters say, your computer program would prove absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, primarily because micro-evolution (which can easily be understood as a feature of Creation) does certainly not imply macro-evolution or abiogenesis.
You're trying to package your religion as something which it isn't. Creationism is Christian theology, not science. People know this. On some level, you know this.
It would seem you are not paying attention to what is actually being said.
You're dead wrong about this.
Macro-evolution (what I call evolutionism), on the other hand, has never been scientifically observed, explained, tested, or anything of the sort. It is an attempt at creating a fanciful story of how things came to be by extrapolating back from what we see now in entirely unrigorous, untestable, unobservable ways. It fits much more squarely in the category of History, Mythology, and indeed Theology (aTheology?) than "Science".
Really it boils down to whether you believe the laws of physics we observe now have been constant throughout time. If you do you’re called an evolutionist, if you don’t you’re called a creationist. Neither side has any proof, nor is any proof fundamentally possible.
The point being is, creationists have zero idea why they think 6,000 is some magic number in this case, other than bob said so in a book. But yea, books are written by men and men are liars. Even looking at things like RNA/DNA mutation rates in known species it's pretty damned easy to see that things have been around a whole lot longer than 6k years.
Again, please understand the underlying assumptions you are making when you concoct statements like this. Namely: DNA/RNA started as a single form and has mutated at a constant rate since then. You have no evidence to support that, and I disagree with every component of it.
Also, any guesses on why the 'modern' age is suddenly going in slow motion. Not exactly sure how you're going to pull that off without breaking chemistry completely.
And I'm not sure why you think the almighty creator of the universe would have trouble making chemistry... "work".
This is unknown and a quite anthropomorphic view on the universe. Just because we can create things doesn't mean we ourselves were created, even in the way you're talking about in the First Mover argument.