Now, during my high school Scripture teaching years, I often had a formally parallel question thrown at me: “What about evolution?” After this gauntlet was thrown down with appropriately monotonous frequency, I honed an equally monotonous answer: “Well, what about evolution?”
Now, I'm glad he did scripture teaching at high school: a great mission activity, but on the surface it's a lame answer: more than monotonous Peter!
The question is one often thrown up, at least implicitly, in many conversations and writings. The not very sub-text of the question is: evolution eliminates the need for, if not the reality of supernatural explanations for the cosmos and life within it. Therefore, the questioner must believe, the Christian explanation, which is supernatural, fails and so thus fails the entire Christian program.
Beneath all this is of course the never articulated understanding that naturalism explains the basic reality of our lives: there is material; and that is all. It and natural processes are comprehensively explanatory at every level (bang goes philosophical idealism, of course, but I'd be pretty pleased about that particular side-effect).
The answer to the question is of course, not to say that the Biblical account of origins and evolutionary speculations can co-exist, because they can't and if it is suggested then it amounts to saying that the Biblical account is symbolic or metaphorical, but for the reality we go to evolution, but evolution is definitive and that eliminates the biblical explanation which only garners its force from materialist postulations and is therefore derivative and not definitive!
What is the answer then?
Well, I think it is to take naturalism to its end point: if material is all there is, and evoultion is true, then final questions can only be material and give us no answers, but leave us where we started, with only a causal chain between! That is, we've gotten nowhere. So the assertion disappears in a puff of its own logic.
But the biblical view is that final questions are personal, and are important as they tell us who we are (not material, and with real significance in real relationships) and by genesis who we are like and made by and therefore for fellowship with. Love has significance. In a material world, it is just a stochastic conjunction of particles.
