The religious fascination with evolution confuses me--esp. since it's such a lost cause. We know less about how gravity works than we do about how evolution works. (Really, we do.) It's over! You might as well insist on geocentrism--and yes, I know that a few still do.
Geocentrism you won't see; the Bible doesn't give a detailed account of it.
Honestly, outside of Evangeliclism, you don't see a religious fascination with it. Where does it come from?
The five solae (by scripture alone, by faith alone, by grace alone, by Christ alone, and glory to God alone), a doctrine of the inerrancy of scripture coupled with a literal interpretation of scripture is where it starts. The Bible is viewed as a contiguous continuity, written by God as a complete book through a human agency. So this eliminates the idea that multiple authors wrote the books and that the current form is a redacted and edited form.
So by scripture alone; no theological ideas that are not found in scripture are accepted. Since scripture is being interpreted as literal, that means that you're starting with belief in a six day creation with every creature being a unique and special creation, humanity included.
The age of the Earth is being determined by adding up the generations from Adam through Moses (or perhaps Adam through David) and coming up with a number of approximately 5700-5800 years. This isn't all that hard to do, given that early generations lived for close to a milenium. As the Bible is being interpreted literally, it assumes that all of the generations are included. As the Bible is inerrant, this cannot be wrong.
Since the creation account and the time recorded in the genologies beginning with the first man on a five day old planet do not match scientific theories of creation nor estimates of the Earth's age,
and since we're working from a literal interpretation of the Bible, you now have a circumstance where somebody must be wrong. Since scripture is inerrant, scientists are not only wrong, but since they have the Bibilical account and choose evolution and a many millions of years old Earth instead, you now have in issue of denial of revealed truth.
Since they believe that the Biblical account is actually a literal and technical account, they view an old Earth and evolution as being as ridiculous as a flat Earth and geocentrism is to you and I. Since the Scopes monkey trial, there has been a public policy argument ever since. Creationists want to see their "correct" views given the same regard in the school system as that scientific fiddle faddle. The establishment clause mitigates against this, so other variations of Creationism that lack direct reference to a specific creator, like Intelligent Design, are tried instead with similar results.
What you end up with is a group of people who feel that their views are marginalized. Groups that feel marginalized tend to be combative, or at least frustrated and on the defensive.
Finally, there is 'Mr. Smith goes to Washington' dynamic at work. The idea that a simple man with comparatively meager education is more noble than a highly educated entrenched man is an idea that is deeply ingrained in American society. It is part of how Sarah Palin attained huge popularity in certain segments of the US population. This dynamic is coupled with the American love of the underdog.
Throw all of this together, along with a dash of conspiracy theorism and a dash of opportunistic frauds who are happy to sell books to people who will buy anything that supports their own view, and you have a self sustaining counter culture that subscribes to Creationsism.
. It's one great thing, other than the delights that fora such as this can bring, that I think the Internet has really made easier - in 'ancient times' it could take me days and a fair bit of travel to find the books I needed to research something that wasn't covered well in the encyclopedias and other texts I physically owned.
How much "younger?" Seriously, MACRO-evolution happens-the "creationism/intelligent design/anti-evolution" crowd hang their entire faulty thesis on "a lack of transitional fossils," when, in fact, 
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