I go through this "should I or shouldn't I?" teach evolution quandary almost every year when pondering the beginning of a new sixth grade school year. Last year, despite very rapidly changing my views to the oppose angle, I taught it anyway. I did so because the kids will encounter the stuff anyway in seventh grade and through high school, and I used it to point out some of the flaws in the reasoning behind it plus the implications of it spiritually when we studied the Creation/Genesis during our Old Testament/Ancient Israel unit a couple months later.
The problems with evolution are manifold, and I don't think the teaching is very compatible at all with not only the Fathers, but just the overall salvation narrative we all know in Christ. Adam and Eve are our first parents, made in the image of God. Evolution denotes a change in mankind, and Christ's humanity would somehow be insufficient if man is still evolving. In addition, we must fully resemble our First Parents, not be a mutation that is eventually going to diverge from them.
There is also the mindset that comes from evolution---we are nothing but animals essentially. We have urges, drives, instincts, and are constantly changing toward...well, who knows? With the evolution mindset, the 'lovely' notions of social Darwinism make great sense, eugenics become very logical, Ayn Rand-style selfish objectivism makes good sense, and might makes right in the end. Morality is blurry. Sex becomes something "natural" and the current state of sexual carnal desires and unchecked passions are 'natural' and healthy and should be explored, whereas with Creation, we weren't meant to be having orgies, "exploring" our "sexuality," or having sodomic relations (yes, a not to you, Rus!
) with the same sex. Heck, our current sexual state isn't even, according to the Fathers, the ideal at all.
Evolution and the Fall don't fit well together.
the science is also shaky. the methodologies of determining ages of things and the really subjective "reconstructions" of these early men is controversial. The scientific community cannot agree on much of anything with evolution except for the common desire to see Creation scoffed-at and ridiculed and disavowed.
Evolution also presupposes a lot of naiveté it seems. Somehow in this Gene Roddenberryesque way we're all evolving into this race that will somehow, someday attain world peace and total hand-in-hand harmony singing "Turn, Turn, Turn" together, when in reality, the world is more violent, dishonest, corrupt, and evil than its ever been.
Original Sin cannot take place without our first parents, and ideas of evolution that say our first parents were the eventual evolution of some primate-like hominids is not satisfactory really. One wonders why God would waste time making homo habilis, homo erectus, Neanderthals, australopithecines, and all sorts of missing links and weird hominids only to let them get wiped out and eventually have one ascend to greatness.
I don't have the answers really. Heck, I often wonder why on Earth God made dinosaurs? What was the point?
But I'm fairly certain, not 100%, but getting there, that evolution doesn't fit with Christianity. And I don't think we should look at the Catholic church, a schismatic body, for affirmation of evolution being acceptable for we Orthodox Christians to adopt as good and laudable.
So, right now I'll probably just teach it in my classroom, go through the theories from the history book, then teach my kids the usual critical thinking allowing them to choose, but to look not only at the evidence as well as the moral and theological dimensions as the year progresses. If I don't teach it or cover it, someone else will after me, and they'll have no tools to combat it or question it or even doubt it in the least.