what do we do with all the fossils and humanoid skeletons and sciencythingies that smart sciency people talk about?
That depends. Is our primary concern with "sciencythingies that smart sciency people talk about," or is it with the Bible? I'm merely trying to show that there's a contradiction between the two.
I don't actually object to looking at Genesis as a myth, but even a
myth has to tell a truth. If Adam & Eve are mythological, then the story is certainly intended to answer an important existential question: where does sin come from? And why are we so inclined to turn away from God in order to indulge our base passions? There are two different explanations. The story in Genesis tells us that we were once in a pure state of grace, and fell from it by disobedience, and now are inclined to sin because we lack that perfect original goodness; we have inherited from our first parents a preference for passion over reason. Contrariwise, the story of evolution tells us that we come from animal stock, and have inherited animal instincts, and are thus genetically predisposed to follow our passions. There never was, according to evolution, a prelapsarian state. According to evolution, we've always been animals, from one generation to the next. We follow our brute passions because that's what brutes do. "Theistic evolution" only says that God gave immortal souls & the ability to reason to a certain pair of primates. "Theistic evolution" has no
mythical aspect whatsoever. It's a cheat; it doesn't really explain anything at all. It's a lame, desperately-devised attempt at compromise between two conflicting narratives. That's why it's not even interesting.
There's a myth in Mahayana Buddhism that tells how humans are the descendants of ethereal god-like beings of pure light who fell gradually into the material world by way of desiring material and sensual pleasures, and that at every stage of the fall these angels became uglier and more corporeal. As Milton would put it: "
purest at first, now gross by sinning grown." But this myth, too, is at variance with evolution. Mahayana Buddhism, of course, has no absolute doctrine invested in this myth, so (unlike Christianity) the Buddhists can dispense with it. The Dalai Lama can blithely say, "if science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change." Our religion, however, cannot. Our creation story is intertwined with our redemption story.
The evolution narrative, by the way, is in some respects a very compelling one. It's fascinating to contemplate that everything with DNA might be interrelated as part of a great tree of life, and that all existence on this earth has been nothing but an epic operatic struggle of survival and adaptation, "
nature red in tooth and claw," and our highly evolved consciousness is but a fluke blip on an otherwise vicious trajectory, for which we should be extremely grateful for the random happenstance of being here, alive and sentient and human, with our frontal lobes of our cerebral cortexes, able to enjoy Beethoven and Shakespeare and sunsets where all other species can't, against the incalculable immeasurable odds. But that's a very
different story from Adam & Eve.