Is Christian opposition to science artificially selective?

Other 19C Bible readers, while comfortable with the general idea "that the Bible was written in terms accommodated to human understanding" and while generally seeking "to reconcile apparent discrepancies between science and Scripture by careful reinterpretation of one or the other," were nevertheless uncomfortable with recourse to the idea of divine accommodation in Scripture when it came to the new biology. Scholars like Edward Pusey (1800-1882), Charles Hodge (1797-1878), and John Dawson (1820-1899) accepted the reinterpretations of Scripture that had arisen as a result of Copernicus' work on cosmology and even the more recent discoveries of the new geology–at least insofar as these established an ancient age for the earth…With respect to Darwinian biology, however, these same scholars were generally opposed to making a similar move–at least given the present state of scientific knowledge.

…there do remain in the modern world not only young-earthers who regard old-earthers as "unbiblical," but also geocentrists and flat-earthers who regard everyone to their "left" (including both old- and young-earthers) the same way–as dangerously liberal in their approach to Scripture. The Bible, these Christians insist, must trump in all cases what unbelieving scientists says; we cannot pick and choose. Those who no longer believe in geocentrism (or flat-earthism), they allege, have capitulated to science even while pretending that they have not. They no longer adhere to what the Bible clearly teaches–in passages like Joshua, for example, where the sun indisputably stands still. I. Provan, The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor 2017), 408, 434.

1. This raises a legitimate issue that deserves to be met head-on. Theologically, evolution raises the stakes in a way that antiquity of the universe does not. Human anthropology is central to Christian theology in a way that geology or geocentrism is not. So it may well be that some Christians are inconsistent on this point. 

2. However, even if where they draw the line is driven by theological motives, and to that degree, arbitrary, it doesn't follow that such distinctions are necessarily arbitrary. Indeed, it begs the question to treat all cases alike unless they are alike. That's not something we an settle in advance, apart from exegetical scrutiny. So there's nothing intrinsically ad hoc about treating these issues on a case-by-case basis, because we don't know if they're all of a kind unless and until we examine them. Even if theological motives sometimes exert undue influence, it's logically fallacious to invalidate a position for that reason alone. We must still evaluate the interpretation on the merits, whether or not impure motives played a role in the conclusion. 

3. The theory of evolution remains scientifically–and not just theologically–controversial in a way that astronomy and geology do not. So at that level alone, the comparison is inapt. It's very difficult to turn evolution into a workable theory. You don't have to be a Christian fundamentalist to say that or see that. 

4. As I've often detailed, questioning flat-earth cosmography doesn't require any knowledge of modern science. The endlessly reproduced three-story mockup wouldn't jive for attentive observers in the ancient Near East. 

5. Modern readers don't come to the geocentric prooftexs as a blank slate. We're inclined to consciously or unconsciously filter that through Ptolemaic astronomy and the Galileo affair. But the OT wasn't using that paradigm. There's precious little evidence that OT writers shared the Hellenistic Greek theoretical interest in celestial mechanics. 

6. The meaning of Joshua's Long Day is far from straightforward. 

i) Joshua's statement is poetic. Notice the parallelism. 

ii) In addition, the narrator is summarizing a description from a book that no longer exists. So we can't compare his summary with the full text of the primary source. We lack the larger context. 

iii) The miracle is describe from the phenomenological standpoint of an earthbound observer: the position of the sun at Gibeon, and the position of the moon in the Valley of Aijalon. That's a perceptual, local frame of reference. 

At the very least it describes a supernatural or preternatural optical astronomical illusion. Maybe something more. But the details can't be reconstructed from the poetry or the summary of primary source that no longer exists.