The Invisible God I Saw on Vacation

One of my closest friends was a state-university-trained evolutionist who participated in public debates with creationists.  I say “was,” because he is now one of the most zealous evangelists for Christ that I know.
When he was new to his relationship with Jesus, we used to run together a couple mornings a week; and I loved picking his brain during those cool mornings.  As a Baptist pastor’s kid who attended Christian grade school, then home school high school, then a Baptist Fundamentalist college, I was reared with very little comparative exposure to evolution, atheism, etc.
He and I didn’t talk extensively about evolution; but I remember him telling me one huge, foundational insight: you can’t forensically convince someone of creation [or any other topic, really] using only the Bible, if they don’t accept the Bible as true.
So, the choice is first to prove the Bible is true (either with empirical data and reasoning or with prayer for a divine revelation) or use empirical, unarguable evidence that you and they already accept.
I was reminded of that tonight during the origins debate at the Creation Museum between Ken Ham and Bill Nye.  Ken Ham—admirable evangelist that he is—kept using the Bible as his premise during a debate with someone who doesn’t accept the Bible as absolute truth.  Based on what I read on Twitter, neither does much of the debate’s online audience of over a half million live viewers.
I believe the Bible is inspired and the ultimate, inerrant authority for life—albeit with mysteries we may not ever understand this side of eternity and difficult passages that I struggle to adopt and obey. I commend someone for using what I believe are God’s transcribed words as the basis for their worldview and for sharing that truth with others.  I’m just not sure that such was the best strategy for winning a science debate.
It wasn’t my debate, and I will never be qualified for that debate.  That said, had I been asked to explain why—outside of my belief in the Bible’s account of a literal six-day creation and relatively-young earth—I believe in intelligent design, my mind would immediately jump back to 2008 and a rain forest in Costa Rica.
My wife and I were on a romantic getaway at a jungle hotel.  We toured the Arenal rain forest with a public-university-trained nature guide explaining the eccentricities of the flora and fauna that we saw as we meandered.  What struck me more than anything were all the symbiotic relationships—both plants with creatures and creatures with other creatures.  In their current state, neither could survive in their current form without the other in its current form.
Were I in Ken Ham’s position, I would have asked Bill Nye how natural selection accounts for that symbiosis.  What are the chances that both species fully evolved separate from each other for each other—in the same minute location in the grand scheme of things?  How many positive mutations would’ve been wasted by right place at wrong time and right time at wrong place?  In the astronomically small chance they serendipitously found each other with all factors in their favor—if they can’t live without each other now, how did they evolve without each other to need each other?
I’m not sure that even Lloyd Christmas would believe in that chance.
On a separate trip, one of my other Lynchburg friends visited Monteverde in Costa Rica’s world-famous cloud forest and talked with a nature guide in that part of the country.  My buddy was struck by both the diversity and the symbiotic aspects of the nature there and was told by his guide that—regardless of religious faith or lack thereof—most rainforest researchers left with at least an allowance for intelligent design as a theory.  After what I witnessed at an arm’s length, this doesn’t surprise me.
Universal truth isn’t afraid of research or even challenge, and God made allowance for people who would never interact with his Scripture or who wouldn’t believe what they read in it, if they did read or hear it.  The Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.”
Personally, I highly doubt that debate would change the minds of most people on either side of the natural selection vs. intelligent design watershed.  Both are faith systems that each require its respective believers to say, “One day we’ll all know the truth.” Until that “one day,” for me, the faith system that I choose over and again absorbs the world with the wonder that Someone imagined a ridiculously-diverse proliferation of ecosystems and then masterfully constructed them to function as designed—with allowance for an alternate system brought on by Adam’s choice.
That probably disqualifies me from objective debates, but I’m not sure that an objective debate on this topic is possible.