Leviticus 17:11 — “For the life of a creature is in the blood ...” (NIV).
Genesis 2:7 — “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (NKJV).
Genesis 2:2 — “And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done” (NKJV).
I’ve never understood what part of these passages is somehow incompatible with the concept of evolution. These passages were written thousands of years ago, but it’s only been in the last century or so that we’ve understood the actual biology, chemistry, physiology, etc., of how our bodies work. So, in the Christianist’s view, because we didn’t understand how blood carries oxygen to the cells until recently, apparently no one should have taken it as an article of faith that God knew what He was talking about. Because we couldn’t quantitfy exactly how our lungs exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide, that whole “breath of life” thing was just so much pablum or hocus-pocus. All the people who came before us who just took the Bible at is word and happily lived their lives trusting that what He says is so, without any actual “proof”, were apparently all just idiots or fools.
Their whole premise seems to be that, absent “proof” that can sufficiently satisfy today’s Christianists, God’s Word just isn’t good enough to take at face value. That whole “trust” and “faith” stuff is only good enough, insofar as it makes sense to them. Because apparently, they’re the final arbiters of what God actually means in the Bible. Their superior “understanding” completely supercedes God’s actual ... you know ... words.
Or how they can take Genesis 1:28 (“have dominion over ... every living thing that moves on the earth”) and somehow twist that around to become God hates the environment. Especially since, in the very next verse, God defines what He means: Genesis 1:29 — “I have given you every herb that yields seed ... and ... to you it shall be for food”. (He also goes on to talk about the beasts of the earth, but He doesn’t say that they’re also food. However, since carnivores are, by definition, critters that eat other critters, I think we can safely assume that at least some critters are people food by extension).
Christianists have taken this verse of “have dominion over” to somehow mean we can completely eviscerate the environment. And in a particularly Herculean act of irony, we can eviscerate it ... for profit, in service to the god of mammon, aka greed. But that interpretation directly conflicts with the command to “be fruitful and multiply”. It’s kind of hard to be “fruitful” or “multiply” if there’s no food because we’ve destroyed the environment. But according to them, for the sake of more and more profit, it’s perfectly okay to destroy ... God’s CREATION.
Now, I’m not a theologian. I’m just an ordinary person who reads the Bible and sees a lot of good stuff in there. For me, evolution and “the seventh day” are not incompatible. My God is big enough to allow for the fact that I don’t know everything. I can’t explain all the mysteries of everything that is, has been or ever will be. If the Bible says that the universe was created in 7 days and science says that it was created over several billion years, I can accept that, just like everybody else who lived before we understood anything about biochemistry or physiology, we don’t know everything yet. Who am I to say that God didn’t use evolution as His vehicle to bring about creation? Who am I to say that He’s incapable of making one day last for a billion years, 2 billion years or any number of years? I have faith that .... He knows what He’s doing. He said what He said for a reason, and if science hasn’t caught up to our understanding of the exact mechanism of how He did it yet, I can just ... trust ... that maybe someday it will. God is not defined by my limits of understanding. My God is bigger than that. And I don’t think that He’s defined by the Christianists’ limits of understanding either.