Why are these the only two choices?
In the way you used to, certainly. Once that cake has been baked you can't unbake it. But I say there is certainly a plausible possibility you can reimagine aspects of how you used to believe or feel into newer larger contexts that don't require you lobotomizing your mind to go back to thinking like a child on these things.
I don't think flip sides of the same coin are the only options. You can discover an entirely different currency with which to make your purchases.
Why not have both? Why do interior dimensions of life have to be reduced to externalized scientific languages? Is it necessary or reasonable in any way for us that, "Poetry is turned into prose, truth into statistics, understanding into facts, education into note-taking, art into criticism, symbols into signs, faith into belief," as a favorite quote of mine goes? If we lose the symbolic nature of life, we lose our humanity, we lose our souls, IMHO.
I do as well, but rather than saying evolution is an intelligent creation, I'd say evolution is the creator creating. It is Spirit in motion, creating form in its own image in every moment. Take it for what it is and what it does, and avoid the temptation to make God in your own image that it has a plan or foresight into end results the way a human might plan out their vacation trip. Successful results are repeated, and the success part is the goal, not walking upright and having the appearance of a human being.
You have to strip away anthropomorphic ideals and just take it for what it is and from there shape how you can think about it. I find it quite intelligent in this way, and loving as well as it is quite life affirming, life giving, in spite of the fact that we all die. That's all part of the Design, if you will. And it is truly Beautiful, as well as terrifying to us blossoming and withering lilies of the Field.
The question of God sort of becomes a non-question at a certain point. It really becomes more a matter of how we choose to talk about whatever this "Ultimate Environment" is to us. I can just as easily speak of it as God, as I can No-God. Atheism and Theism become really more figures of speech, than definitions of what this Ultimate Reality is.
We get too hung up on trying to figure out what "it" is, as if it were something external to us. In reality, we are "it", subjectively, as well as objectively. We cannot be separated from it, and the ways we talk about Reality will always include us in it. Your personal identity in reality is not forfeited, but actually fully and completely Realized.
This might be something that might be meaningful to you as really high-level introduction to Integral Theory (which is where I land on the question of the OP). From that basic sort of view, I come to what I've shared above in how I think about it for myself.
https://www.amazon.com/Sociable-God-Toward-Understanding-Religion/dp/1590302249
