Evolution can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. Neither can it rule out or prove that God is the origin of everything including life. Biology isn't the right field for that sort of inquiry. One might as well claim that basket weaving disproves poetry.
The same could be said of creationism. It doesn't prove or disprove the existence of God.
Believing in a theistic evolutionary process does not automatically exclude Adam and Eve.
As a Christian it's purely a matter of faith that God had a hand in all creation. Now, whether you believe that God created Adam and Eve literally as it says in the Bible or whether an evolutionary process was used is a moot point because God has a hand in
all creation regardless of process.
Like I said earlier, theologians are divided over the literal intepretation of Genesis creation story. Some argue a day to God could well be a thousand years in human time. Others take the literal interpretation. Both are equally valid for a Christian to believe because both were authored by the hand of God.
Mothers co-create life with God, although he is the author they participate in that creation of life. It doesn't minimise Gods role it only serves to magnify Our Lords greatness.
The literal intepretation of Genesis creation story was not believed by Jews throughout history or today, it is a modern manmade idea.
Chronological Reading of Genesis (CAF)
'According to the chronological reading, the six days of creation should be understood to have followed each other in strict chronological order. This view is often coupled with the claim that the six days were standard 24-hour days.
Some have denied that they were standard days on the basis that the Hebrew word used in this passage for day (
yom) can sometimes mean a longer-than-24-hour period (as it does in Genesis 2:4). However, it seems clear that Genesis 1 presents the days to us as standard days. At the end of each one is a formula like, "And there was evening and there was morning, one day" (Gen. 1:5). Evening and morning are, of course, the transition points between day and night (this is the meaning of the Hebrew terms here), but periods of time longer than 24 hours are not composed of a day and a night. Genesis is presenting these days to us as 24-hour, solar days.
If we are not meant to understand them as 24-hour days, it would most likely be because Genesis 1 is not meant to be understood as a literal chronological account.
That is a possibility. Pope Pius XII warned us,
"What is the literal sense of a passage is not always as obvious in the speeches and writings of the ancient authors of the East, as it is in the works of our own time. For what they wished to express is not to be determined by the rules of grammar and philology alone, nor solely by the context; the interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use. For the ancient peoples of the East, in order to express their ideas, did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech which we use today; but rather those used by the men of their times and countries. What those exactly were the commentator cannot determine as it were in advance, but only after a careful examination of the ancient literature of the East" (Divino Afflante Spiritu 35–36).
The Topical Reading
This leads us to the possiblity that Genesis 1 is to be given a non-chronological, topical reading. Advocates of this view point out that, in ancient literature, it was common to sequence historical material by topic, rather than in strict chronological order.
The argument for a topical ordering notes that at the time the world was created, it had two problems—it was "formless and empty" (1:2). In the first three days of creation, God solves the formlessness problem by structuring different.aspects of the environment.
On day one he separates day from night; on day two he separates the waters below (oceans) from the waters above (clouds), with the sky in between; and on day three he separates the waters below from each other, creating dry land. Thus the world has been given form.
But it is still empty, so on the second three days God solves the world’s emptiness problem by giving occupants to each of the three realms he ordered on the previous three days. Thus, having solved the problems of formlessness and emptiness, the task he set for himself, God’s work is complete and he rests on the seventh day.
Real History
The argument is that all of this is
real history, it is simply ordered topically rather than chronologically, and the ancient audience of Genesis, it is argued, would have understood it as such.
Even if Genesis 1 records God’s work in a topical fashion, it still records God’s work—things God really did.
The
Catechism explains that
"Scripture presents the work of the Creator symbolically as a succession of six days of divine ‘work,’ concluded by the ‘rest’ of the seventh day" (CCC 337), but "nothing exists that does not owe its existence to God the Creator. The world began when God’s word drew it out of nothingness; all existent beings, all of nature, and all human history is rooted in this primordial event, the very genesis by which the world was constituted and time begun" (CCC 338).
It is impossible to dismiss the events of Genesis 1 as a mere legend. They are accounts of
real history, even if they are told in a style of historical writing that Westerners do not typically use'.
