They're not confronting it...

Creationist Students Take Trip to Evolution Headquarters: The Smithsonian - washingtonpost.com: "The Genesis of a Debate"

They think they're confronting what evolution says, but they're not. They believe one thing, and will not be persuaded- at least that's what they hope.

The question we deal with in science is whether what we imagine to be true is supportable by what can be demonstrated to be true. If we move past scientific answers to the question of origins, as a matter of natural philosophy, we end up dealing with a world where anything arguable can be held to be true, where Hindus, Japanese Animists, and others have equal claim, along with everybody else, including the advocates of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The question of whose hand, essence, or noodle is in creation becomes a matter for a debate that no human being has the capability to successfully conclude.

Science's usefulness comes from its ability to draw different scholars into more symmetric debates about what's going on. Better yet, much of that symmetry is based on a mapping, a pegging of the premises of that debate to reliable information and theory about the world itself. The solution of the puzzle, too is based upon these shared premises.

So there are two important parts here to what's going on: there are convergence encouraging standards at work here, and those standards are based upon the interpretation of reality, as we are able to sense and perceive it. There is resolution to such arguments, or at least turns on the path of theory that can lead it to better approximation of reality.

Religion, though, always has been, and always remains about things beyond that reality, beyond provability, beyond comprehension. The bible itself says God is out of our league, and it must be true if we're talking about a God capable of setting in motion, much less understanding the complexity of the world we're struggling to only begin to understand, and which single persons can spend careers, lifetimes even, studying one aspect of. The folks on this trip scoff at science, but I think of science as a sort of humility, in terms of scholarship.

Let's say they're right, and divine fingerprints can be seen, and the bible can be used as a basis for paleontology, and other deep-time related fields. What keeps somebody from attributing the explained phenomena to events or concepts in the Buddhist Sutras, the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, or the Norse Legends of a slaughtered, primal Ice Giant? Nothing really. Everybody's free to interpret, because nothing symmetrically observable or testable exists binds those interpretations, proves it false or true in any way. Some want that freedom, but it's not really useful for coming up with and refining dependable theories about the way the world works. A theory of that kind, to be most valid, must be lead to conform to the shape of the real world. The less the distinctions of the observable, testable real world matter, the more unanchored, out to sea, the theories a person will be able to come up with.