You two are really awesome. Love the deep thinking going on here. Contrary to what most commony believed nowadays, "modern science" was created by the church as a way to explain "how" creation works. One of the earliest well known scientists is Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, who was also a Catholic priest. His universal expansion theory would later become the Hubble's Law, the basis of the Big Bang Theory.
This whole "science vs church" argument is just a political divide created by, well... angry people specifically targetting Christians. Many Christians and conservatives themselves then get sucked into the argument without realizing the original fundamental of science was "in support" of God and creation. This is why majority of the IV league east coast universities all started out as seminaries.
Now specifically on Darwinism, I find that most people who use it to attack creationism didn't actually even read Darwin's work. Had they did, they would've known Darwin was a Christian and his theory of evolution, like most scientists of his genre, is in support of God and creationism. The basis of "Natural Selection" is about evolution based passing the dominant genes through offsprings for the survival of the species. Nothing in there contradicts the Bible and nothing in there talks about gene mutation, at least at the level where most of these "X-men" watching plebs think evolution is. And there is absolutely nothing in Darwin's work that even comes close to support that man evolved from monkeys or apes.
Existence of man has nothing to do with intelligence. It has to do with sentience. This is what separates us from the animals. No matter how intelligent an animal is, it is never sentient. And to be frank about it, I find a lot of "humans" are not very sentient either. Sentience is defined by the ability to ponder one's own existence, the nature of the question, "Who am I?" "What am I doing here?" "Who created me?"