It’s important to me in the sense that it shows that some Christian scientists who accept evolution are willing to say that a Biblical creation story might be really about the physical and historical world, and not just about the realm of “purpose, value, and meaning.” That’s a refreshing change. In reaction to ID, American TE/EC retreated into the compartmentalization of truth, and as a result it alienated the very people it was hoping to win over – conservative evangelicals. Your suggestion has at least the hope of winning over some moderate conservative evangelicals. If I were a conservative evangelical, I would consider it as a possibility.
But I’m not a conservative evangelical. I regard the form of the Adam and Eve story as mythical (meaning myth in the technical sense, without any pejorative connotations), and have no interest in trying to prove that the details of the story correspond in a precise way to a set of events that actually happened in the past. I’m not trying to rescue Adam and Eve. So I’ve no need to try to find a way of working a specially created Adam and Eve into an overall evolutionary account of the origin of living things on the earth.
To me, a historical Adam and Eve (as distinct from an ontological claim about our “fallenness”) is not a theological hill to die on. A theological hill to die on is the claim that the world really is designed. If the world is not really designed, then there is no point maintaining Christianity or any form of theism at all. That the world is designed can’t be just a personal emotional preference that resides only in the realm of “values and meaning”; it must be conceived of as an objective truth. (Whether the design is demonstrated by “science” or by some other means is a separate question.)
The only positive ways I see forward would be stoutly resisted by a large number of your frequent posters here. There is no collective way forward for the PS community as a whole. If one constantly has to keep fending off complaints by people who reject the existence of God or the truth of Christianity, one can never make any progress in theology/science harmonization. I personally would like to see PS split into two different “rooms”; in Room 1 atheists and believers would argue endlessly about whether God exists, whether the Bible is revealed, whether the Christianity is true, whether Christian morality is good morality, whether the world would be better off without religion, whether fundamentalism is bad for US politics, etc. In Room 2 all such arguments would be strictly forbidden. Room 2 would be for those who believe that Christianity is true, and who are interested in discussing with other Christians evolution and various other religion/science questions, trying out various proposals, getting criticism from each other, etc. I believe great progress could be made in Room 2 under such a division. The discussions on science and theology would not have to constantly loop back to proving first principles, and foundering when it becomes clear that there are irreconcilable differences regarding those principles.