Well, I agree the Bible is incompatible with evolution. There's no need to argue that. You would be wasting your breath, though not for the reasons you give.
The thrust of my argument is that when science and the bible butt heads, science must win, and that not even the very pious can make a cogent rebuttal of this idea. Science stands as a direct and ongoing inquiry of the universe (which tradition holds is God's direct handiwork) and no ancient book, however cherished, can hope to compete as an accurate representation of truth.
I do not categorically dismiss the entirety of the Bible; there are things in the Bible that are clearly true, are that are supported by other sources, and even do well under scientific scrutiny. The reason that (unless you are a devoted bible scholar) you don't hear about these parts more often is that nobody argues about them! There's no controversy there, so they don't make the news.
Being partly true proves little, though. The film "Amadeus" is partly true, but contains large doses of exaggeration, speculation and outright fabrication. Even so, the movie contains some valid, worthwhile messages (in this case, the dangers of envy and obsession.) My opinion is that all of this can also be said of the Bible. That is, of course, only my opinion, but I can't imagine - (unless you further suppose that God personally oversaw every word in every edition in every version of the Bible from first to latest) how you can call that anything but inevitable.
You are correct though, Hoyle was an athiest, thanks for catching my error. I am familiar with Hoyle's challenge, and welcome it. His arguments don't impress me because most of them are what author Richard Dawkins termed "The Argument from Personal Incredulity". Hoyle finds the likelihood of life arising by chance to be "absurd" and refers time and again about his own difficulty in accepting the various tenets of evolutionary theory.
This frankly says as much about Hoyle's knowledge, vision and imagination as it does about the subject he is discussing. It is incredibly difficult (and for Hoyle it seems, impossible) for the human mind to grasp the scope of the time over which evolution operates, and to appreciate the scale of the parallelism (to borrow a computer term) at which it functions. Consider also how only a single success is required, amongst the (billions of years * millions of chemical reactions per year * quadrillions of parallel instances at once) that took place in the primordial oceans.
Speaking personally, I have no trouble believing in those odds at all. You clearly feel differently, as is your right.
