In battles against superstition and ignorance, such as the one recently lost in Kansas, we need to take our allies where we can find them. And since most people are theists, this means we need the support of theists who accept the fact of evolution. Still, it strikes me that belief in "theistic evolution" is an act of cognitive dissonance at best, an attempt by the believer to have his cake and eat it too. The typical approach is to say something about how evolution is the means by which God creates species, or that "God set evolution into motion," as movie reviewer Roger Ebert put it in a recent column.
Most models of evolution hinge on two factors: random mutation and natural selection. The Judeo-Christian model of God includes the attributes of omnipotence and omniscience. These models aren't compatible. Some theists (the Calvinists) have attempted to deal with the fact that if an omnipotent, omniscient God exists, then there's no such thing as free will, but I don't think many have considered that there's also no such thing as chance.
Think about it: God is all-powerful and all-knowing. Everything he wants to happen happens, and everything that happens is what he wants to happen. And he knows the outcome of everything that does or will ever happen. So God decides who wins every lottery, God decides who gets struck by lightning, God even decides if you roll the double-fives or better you need to beat your sister at backgammon.
Under this scenario, both random mutation and natural selection go out the window. There's nothing random about mutation, and there's nothing natural about selection. Instead, evolution simply becomes a wasteful and cruel means of bringing about God's goal, which is supposed to be Man. Given that an all-powerful God could have done things exactly as described in Genesis, why wouldn't he? Why would he instead take so long and be so inefficient about it? Or if he did follow the Genesis script, why did he plant the fossil, radiometric, and astronomical evidence that would hide his work?
One alternative is to take Ebert's approach, to say that "God set evolution in motion," but didn't tinker with it as it occurred. This is also a rather unsatisfactory answer. For one thing, it smacks of deism, to suggest that God put everything in place and established the rules at Creation, but hasn't tinkered with it since. Deism denies the personal God accepted by the vast majority of theists. And both theistic evolutionary models have to decide at what point the book of Genesis does start becoming accurate history, because without the story of Adam, Eve, and the Fall, a lot of the Christian salvation scheme starts falling apart. Either they have to say that God used evolution to fine-tune his creation until he got to Adam and Eve, on whom he bestowed souls, or God let evolution take its course until there were enough humans running around so that Cain and Seth would have someone to breed with, and then he slapped Adam and Eve, the first real humans with souls, into the Garden of Eden.
Well, again, I'm glad that most theists aren't blind to the facts of science, and are as appalled as we are at the actions of the Kansas Board of Education. But it seems a lot of intelligent theists have gotten too used to compartmentalizing their thoughts, storing their knowledge of science in one room of their mind and their religious beliefs in another and not letting the occupants of the two rooms speak, for fear of conflict. It would be interesting if more of them did let their mind's tenants speak to each other; I'd expect a lot of religious ideas to get eviction notices!