How can you claim with certainty that Book X is literal while Book Y is not. It doesn't hold. Besides, many of the earlier chapters are written version of oral tradition. They weren't recorded as they happened. So after being handed down mouth to ear, generation by generation, the stories are finally recorded. Then translated, then translated again. At all steps of translation there's room for bias, especially since those doing the translators had an agenda.
Although frankly, I'm lost as to what you're arguing. Are you saying that evolution is bunk and it's all creationism? Or is you argument simply that it's impossible for the two to ever come to terms with each other.
If one is going to discuss the earth, how it, or its inhabitants, came to being, or anything that's happened to it or around it throughout history, then it must be discussed on the basis of observable facts, not simply the words in a document. Clearly if the two are to be ratified then there must be a symbolic meaning to the biblical passages. To rant and rave that science must be wrong because there are a few cases in which a mistake was made is ludicrous.
The beauty of science is that it's purpose is to be hard on itself. Whenever anyone in the comunity claims something there are a dozen others out there who will try to poke holes in it. That may sound harsh, but if you want to be rock solid sure about something, there's no better way. The result is that often the central concept of a theory will remain the same, but the details surrounding it will change, evolutionary theory is not immune to this, there's been a big jump between Darwinian and Gouldian evolution, but the underlying concept is the same. If the theory of creationism was arrived at via science instead of a biblical passage it would have been completely discarded years ago. That's not a slag at creationism, just a statement of fact.
The problem with the public perception of science is that most 'laypeople' (non-scientists) don't understand this. So when the next report comes out that says that what we told you last time isn't quite true, someone jumps up and says "we can't trust science so this unproven, untested thing that I'm claiming must be true!". It's not that there's something wrong with laypeople, if they all understood science I'd be out of a job!
All that's lacking is a bit of perspective. You gotta know that information is going to improve as our instruments improve. As instruments get better, someone out there will poke holes in an existing theory.
They're called theories because by definition science can never prove 100% that something "IS", you can only prove that something "IS NOT". That holds for all inductive arguments.
c: lol
