You see the thing is, Buffalo, that if we see the creative imagination of God as more of a dance than a statue, as an endless swirling of elements, combining, decomposing and recombining in a continuous kaleidoscope of beauty, we see suffering, pain and death as part of the pattern. It may be that there is some glorious climactic apotheosis to the dance, but that doesn’t mean that the time leading up to it is merely a preparation: every second is a complete and individual expression of God’s joy in mathematical coherence, and his careful consideration for every minuscule fragment of it.
The creation and destruction of a million extinct species as some kind of preparatory stage towards the invention of man seems banal and tawdry by comparison. If you want to point people to God, point them to deep space, deep time, and the sheer coherent, comprehensive majesty of the evolutionary Universe, not the tacky rabbit-out-of-a-hat cheapness of six-day literalism.
Bless us all.