Another drive-by post. There’s too many great bits of information on here to call one out, so I would just read the entire piece.
In the context of this particular quote, I don’t find the debate about evolution vs. creation very relevant. Most of the debate originates between pushy scientists who really want to disprove something with faulty epistemology, and overreacting Christians with a chip on their shoulder trying their darndest to make scripture say something it really doesn’t.
If the Bible does not insist that God bypassed scientifically describable processes in the material creation of human beings (since its authors and its intended audience had no such categories), it should not be used to rule out scientific explanations for material human origins (such as evolution). Both the Bible and theology agree that God is pervasively involved in his world no matter what level of scientifically describable cause and effect we can detect. So it is not inconsistent with the biblical text to suggest that God created human beings over a long period of time through processes that operate according to recognizable cause and effect patterns. As such, evolutionary creationism would be a perfectly acceptable view for Christians who take both the Bible and science seriously. God’s activity is not limited to what scientifically describable cause and effect processes fail to explain; he is engaged in working through all processes.
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Read this the day you posted it, but wanted to think it over. Some years ago I realized that I just don’t care about the mechanics of how we got here and I’m convinced the Bible doesn’t address it. I don’t think it makes a dime’s worth of difference for anything. What matters most from the Eden narrative is our condition after the Fall.
I don’t care either, really, though I find a lot of proposed origin stories fascinating, and I’m not above considering some of the wackier ones…like alien genetic experimentation. It’s good fodder for storytelling, and it’s kinda fun to read the religious fuddy-duddies getting upset that their pet theory doesn’t get special treatment.
But like I said, I’m not about to make scripture say something it doesn’t, especially when we know the writers weren’t addressing the mechanics. How could they? It couldn’t even be in the realm of their epistemology.