["I said, in the case of a conflict between a well established observation and a religious text."]

Therein lies the rub, however. Evolution is not a "well-established observation". Evolution rests on circumstantial evidences from which it is deduced as an explanation. Neither evolution nor creation are, by their very nature, subject to empirical, verifiable, repeatable experimentation. To the extent that generational variation has occurred, it has been within type, not between type. We've simply no experimental evidence that fish become frogs become lizards.

["I have yet to see a single instance where scientists and religious folk duked it out over something and the religious folk were shown to be right. It's never, not once, happened."]

False, I've seen it happen. Back in the early 1990s, the hard-core, literal 7-day creationists like Duane Gish and Gary Parker were routinely engaged on university campuses across the country to debate with evolutionist professors, usually but not always on the university's staff. The creationists would crush the evolutionists most of the time. It happened here at the university where I got my degree (i.e. empirical observation). It was after several rounds of this that the evolutionists began the "we won't debate them because that will just given them undeserved credibility" line.