Evolution is not Abiogenesis

I seem to be the first person to reply direct to the OP. How odd. I think it might help to try and put oneself in the shoes of the creationist for a little while.For them, this is a debate about origins.
They have a creation story, it accounts for the origins of life, the earth, the universe, languages and mankind. Their modern creation story includes microevolution from created kinds to try to account for the diversity of life.And they view evolution as a rival creation story.
So in their mind, the story must account for the origins of life, the earth, the universe, languages and mankind. They see evolution as a naturalistic (or more commonly, atheistic) origins account. This explains why creationists frequently go on about abiogenesis and the big bang in discussions about biodiversity or adaptation.

Gould is your man

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"Evolution," from the Latin evolvere, literally means "an unrolling"--and clearly implies an unfolding in time of a predictable or prepackaged sequence in an inherently progressive, or at least directional, manner (the "fiddlehead" of a fern unrolls and expands to bring forth the adult plant--a true evolution of preformed parts). The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word "evolution" to seventeenth-century English poetry. Here the word's key meaning--the sequential exposure of prepackaged potential--inspired the first recorded usages in our language. For example, Henry More (1614-87), the British philosopher responsible for several of the seventeenth-century citations in the OED entry, stated in 1664,"I have not yet evolved all the intangling superstitions that may be wrapt up."

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Although the word "evolution" does not appear in the first edition of Origin of Species, Darwin does use the verbal form "evolved" clearly in the vernacular sense and in an especially crucial spot: the very last word of the book!

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But Darwin could not have described the process regulated by his mechanism of natural selection as "evolution" in the vernacular meaning then conveyed by the word. For the mechanism of natural selection yields only increasing adaptation to changing local environments, not predictable progress in the usual sense of cosmic or general betterment expressed as growing complexity, augmented mentality, or whatever. In Darwin's causal world, an anatomically degenerate parasite, reduced to a formless clump of feeding and reproductive cells within the body of a host, may be just as well adapted to its surroundings, and just as well endowed with prospects for evolutionary persistence, as is the most intricate creature, exquisitely adapted in all parts to a complex and dangerous external environment. Moreover, since natural selection can adapt organisms only to local circumstances, and since local circumstances change in an effectively random manner through geological time, the pathways of adaptive evolution cannot be predicted.

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Herbert Spencer's progressivist view of natural change probably exerted the greatest influence in establishing "evolution" as the general name for Darwin's process, for Spencer held a dominating status as Victorian pundit and grand panjandrum of nearly everything conceptual. In any case, Darwin had too many other fish to fry and didn't choose to fight a battle about words rather than things. He felt confident that his views would eventually prevail, even over the contrary etymology of a word imposed upon his process by popular will. (He knew, after all, that meanings of words can transmute within new climates of immediate utility, just as species transform under new local environments of life and ecology!) Darwin never used the "e" word extensively in his writings, but he did capitulate to a developing consensus by referring to his process as evolution for the first time in Descent of Man, published in 1871. (Still, Darwin never used the word "evolution" in the title of any book--and he chose, in his book on human history, to emphasize the genealogical "descent" of our species, not our "ascent" to higher levels of consciousness.)

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It goes on.