Biblical Interpretation
I firmly believe that the Bible is without error. However, I believe that that "without error" only applies to the points that the authors were trying to make, not to every statement that someone might start thinking it means when they're reading it in a different context. I believe that when it comes to the creation stories in Genesis, they are best understood as a sort of poetry, whose significance and meaning is not primarily about the physical mechanisms by which humans and other things came into being. The meaning of those chapters goes much deeper than mere science. From Genesis we learn that God values order; that we were made on purpose and not by accident; that all that exists is good. We learn this and much more. To boil down the truth of the creation stories to something that rules out the possibility of evolution is to miss the point.Generation
"But Genesis says that God created man. If we evolved, then God didn't create man."What you probably don't know is that we have already had this argument. "If human beings come into existence through the natural process of sex and fertilization, then God doesn't create individual people." It's not true. I am not just a byproduct of God's general desire to have human beings on the planet. He specifically intended me to exist. AND I came into being through a completely natural biological process. It's not either/or. It's both/and.
You could say that fertilization and evolution are merely the means that God used to accomplish his creation of me and of mankind. But even this truth pales compared to the full reality of the situation. I could not exist, right this second, if God were not still creating me. He kept my parents in existence at every moment of their lives; without His continual fiat1, the egg and sperm that became me would have ceased to exist; He created my soul directly at my first moment; He continues to say "Let there be Anna" for all eternity.
God never stops creating all of mankind. Not a second goes by without God's creative power keeping the human race in existence and shaping it into the forms He desires. To see this, and still think that evolution somehow conflicts with God being our Creator, is to be blind to the glory that's happening all around us.
The Example
"But my great-great-great-grandparents weren't monkeys. It is impossible for something "made in the image of God" to have animals as parents."Tell that to Jesus. From a mere human something infinitely greater was born. Something divine. If God can deign to be born from a creature that He himself had made, far be it from us to stand on our pride and demand that we not be born, simply because it is lower than us, from a creature so grand our meager creative powers could not have produced it.
There is something more here than just practicing the virtue of humility. In Jesus's conception, something lesser - something human - was united with something greater, a divinity that came directly from the Father. This is the model that God gives us for our own creation. In the mists of time, something lesser - an animal body - was united with something greater, a spiritual soul that came directly from God. The story of Jesus is the story of our race. That Jesus was born from a woman tells us not just that it's ok if we are descended from apes2, but that we are.
Patterns
God likes patterns. God likes to use his favorite patterns more than once. Google "phi in nature" or "Christian typology" if you don't believe me. There's one particular pattern that shows up that is relevant here. Let me paint you some pictures.A single, simple egg hatches into a chick, which sheds its fuzz, grows feathers, and eventually develops into a full-grown chicken.
What begins as a nut grows and develops, forming trunk and roots, until at last an oak tree stands there.
A tiny seed sprouts and lengthens, forming leaves and then petals. At the end, a sunflower turns its face to the sun.
This pattern of small-growing-to-big is not limited to biology, although every organism follows it. The very universe itself began as a mathematically-small point and grew over time, developing stars and galaxies and dust. It's still growing.
Let's look at another example from biology, but not a single organism this time. The human race began as a single Adam and then grew, spreading out, forming races and cultures that gave it shape. It, too, is still growing.
So what does this pattern have to do with evolution? Evolution is the same pattern, another instance of something God likes. Somewhere life began as a single species, perhaps a single cell. Life grew and spread, diversifying into different species that served their own purposes, filled their own niches, the way that an embryo's stem cells diversify into muscles and bones, or the universe diversified into the elements of the periodic table.
At no point in time is the continuity broken between the egg and the chicken, the nut and the tree. At no point since the Big Bang has the previous universe ceased to exist and a new universe taken its place. Ditto for the human race. Even when the Flood happened, Noah formed a connection, so that you could trace your ancestors back to the first human. Evolution merely says that this same continuity applies to the growth of life. The chain that connects every living species to the first undifferentiated life is an unbroken one.
1. "Fiat" means "Let there be", as in 'Fiat Lux' - "Let there be light", God's creative words at the beginning of time.
2. Yes, I realize they aren't literally apes in the sense of the ape species that is alive today.
