Where do Creationists think the Theory of Evolution comes from?

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The credibility of evolutionism is based on little more than the accumulated habit of interpreting everything to fit it over the last century plus,...

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That's where you are wrong - The theory of evolution predicts that if, out of the natural variation in a population of organisms of the same species, you (rather than some blind natural force) select the individuals that best fit your need, you can substantially alter a species - and generations of animal and plant breeders have proven the scope of this method. Modern biochemist use in-vitro evolution (evolution in the test tube, in viruses and in bacteria) as a tool to produce novel proteins for medical therapy, diagnostics and research. There are literally hundreds of biotech and pharmaceutical companies worldwide that make their living using these methods. For biochemist working in the field of protein engineering, evolution is not just a theory to explain the past, but a powerful method to work towards the future.The theory of evolution was formulated at a time when virtually nothing was known about the physical mechanisms of heredity. The fact that the comparison of the genetic code of different species leads to the same phylogenetic relationships as the comparison of the morphologies (shapes) and the analysis of the fossil record is the strongest confirmation of the theory of evolution a scientist could wish for - If species had been created independent of each other, there would be no need for all living organisms to use the same code, no need for the complexity of gen duplication, diversification and pseudogene formation we observe when we analyze an organism on a molecular level.

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I didn't say MUTATION was new, I said ALL THIS EMPHASIS on mutation is new. All of a sudden everything is mutation. Most of it is not beneficial, much of it is destructive but who cares, the more the better.

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In evolution, mutation (diversification) and selection cannot be separated. If you had just selection without diversification, you would soon run out variants to select from and your system would cease to evolve. You would end up with a very homogenous populations no longer able to adapt to changes in the selection pressure.If you had just diversification without selection, you would increase the diversity in the population. However, since most random changes in such complex a system as a living organism are changes to the worse, your system would deteriorate.The balance between the rate of mutation and the stringency of selection determines how an evolving system develops: The evolutionary drift (change in the average properties of a population over successive generation) depends on striking a balance where the rate of mutation is large enough to maintain sufficient diversity in the population to selection from, and the stringency of selection is sufficient to eliminate those variants which do not improve the adaptation to the selective pressure.

Actually there is experimental evidence in bacteria, since these have such short generation time that you can actually observe evolution in action, that the rate of mutation adjusts, mainly through mutations in the DNA repair enzymes. If you put bacteria under high selective pressure, you select vor strains in which DNA repair is impaired, which leads to increased frequency of mutations.(e.g http://www.bcm.edu/fromthelab/vol04/is8/05oct_n1.htm,
see Conserved domains in DNA repair proteins and evolution of repair systems - PubMed
for a review on the different repair systems)Of course, the more complex an organism is, and the larger its genome, the more precise its DNA replication has to be to keep the number of mutations per generation within the optimal range.

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why would a contradicting scientific theory prove to be so popular?

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Because the "creation theory" only gave an answer to the question "where do species come from?" but failed to explain many of the questions posed by the naturists at the time. For example "Why do we find so many fossils of species of which where are no living representatives ?" , "Why do we find such different species in similar habitats on different continents and islands?", "Why can we improve the quality of a herd of cattle or a breed of dog by selective breeding?". The times of Darwin were a time of exploration and scientific observation.