Well, this thread has wandered off a long way from the original topic -- a gee-whiz post about the things string theorists claim in a desperate attempt to keep all of physics inside differential geometry, rather than needing to learn any other mathematics, thereby rendering their enterprise non-scientific (and disadvantaging it in terms of Occam's Razor, in comparison to a theory invoking Divine intervention, by needing not one not-directly observable entity, but a whole host of them, string vacuum states in the early universe, dark matter, dark energy, a whole host of "other universes",...).
I would observe about the rest of what has come up:
(1) Strictly speaking evolution means "change in allele frequency over time". That this happens is an indisputable fact. What is open to debate scientifically is whether the Darwinian mechanism of "random" mutation and natural selection provides a complete or even adequate explanation for the change in allele frequency. There are hints that there may be some subtle Lamarkian mechanisms involved as well, and epigenetics makes the whole project much more complicated.
Of course the "debate" about Darwinian evolution is not primarily scientific, but rather metaphysical, and is so heated because both sides seem to accept as true the notion that a mechanism that involves randomness is somehow or other contrary to the mechanism's operation being intentional. One side says "random variation was involved in the development of biological diversity, therefore there is no Creator"; the other says, "God made the world, humanity included, therefore a description of its making that involves random variation must be false." I say, remember that hardening metal and annealing metal involve sequences of thermal (that is random) effects, but an archeologist who finds a piece of well-hardened metal or a piece of annealed metal will assume they are a fragment of an artifact, something created intentionally. We Orthodox Christians say "I believe in One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of
all things visible and invisible..." Among the invisible things are the laws of physics, the laws of logic, the laws of probability, space, time, numerosity, extent .... The Sovereignty of God does not end at the door of a casino.
(2) Biblical literalism is the odd view that the books of Scripture were addressed principally to post-Rennaisance rationalists, and thus that their truths should be discovered by reading them with the same mind-set (we Orthodox prefer the word phronema) with which one reads post-Rennaisance scientific treatises. This was certainly not how Christians who lived in the same culture as the Holy Apostles read them. St. Basil the Great, whose commentary on Genesis,
The Hexameron is often held up to claim the Fathers of the Church were literalists in their interpretation of Genesis, writes early in the book, "it matters not whether you say 'day' or 'aeon', the thought is the same". There is also an ancient Christian tradition of referring to the Age to Come as "the Eighth and Eternal Day", which refers to the related tradition that all of human history lies within the seventh day on which God rested from His works. The Psalmist's warning about God's time scales is a bit more flexible than equating a day and a millenium: "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night." (Note the deliberate lack of precision, a watch in the night is perhaps 3 hours, and it is not a day, but 'yesterday when it is past', the mere memory of a day gone by.) I commend to your attention the commentary on Genesis by probably the best Greek lay theologian of the last century, Alexander Kalamiros, here:
https://www.scribd.com/document/75080212/The-Six-Dawns-by-Dr-Alexander-Kalomiros . By reading Genesis in the partistic phronema, rather than a rationalist phronema, he quite masterfully shows that there is no conflict between the Truth of Scripture and the truths of modern science.