"Since you've thrown out sequence and time from the problem, the scientific view of how life came to be fits in Genesis just fine."
IMHO you better reread the passages. The order of appearances of life forms does not square with current "scientific" consensus even if one concedes that "days" can mean incredibile long "ages". BTW - There are not "two" different creation stories in Genesis. The "second" story is merely an amplification of the first -centering on mankind specifically.
Gen 1 is close enough considering the non-scientific nature of the culture and the language. Day is an indefinite period of time confirmed by Gen 2:4.
The Adam story is an attempt to explain where we came from, adapted from a pagan story that was told many centuries before.
To take either Gen 1 or Gen 2 in a simplistic manner without injecting the milleu of the time of writing and the spiritual aspect is just plain silly.
No, you had better do the re-reading.
The two creation stories have specific sequences, and they are completly different. Let's go in sequence.
Genesis 1:1 [created heaven and earth]
1:3 [created light]
1:4 [created darkness]
Hold it. Isn't darkness the lack of light? How could darkness be created AFTER light?
1:9 [created land and water]
1:11 [plants]
1:14 [created sun and moon]
Now lets stop for a second. God created light and darkness, then plants. But THEN he created the sun and the moon? How is that?
Quite obviously we have to throw out Genesis 1 as a sequential description of the creation of life, because plants cannot live without sunlight. And it makes little sense either that the earth would have light (Gen 1:3), but no sun and moon (Gen 1:14)
And what was the Earth doing all this time with no sun to orbit? Are you also throwing out orbital mechanics along with Evolution? And the gravitational disruption that would happen when God zapped the sun and moon into being. Think of the Tsunamis that would happen by turning on the tides suddenly like that.
Let's continue:
Genesis 2:4 These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, [This is the preamble of an entirely different creation story. How do you think the book of Genesis came into being anyway? My Old Testament History class at Oklahoma Baptist University taught me that Genesis was a collection of oral stories first transcribed by Moses. The fact that there are two stories here would seem to confirm that explanation]
Genesis 2:5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. [This is important in this creation story. God did not yet create plants, because there was no man to tend them]
Gen 2:6 [created mist and water]
Gen 2:7 [formed man from dust]
Gen 2:8 And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. [The second story explicity says that the garden (plants) were not created until AFTER man. This disagrees with the explicit sequence in Gen 1]
These clear contradictions must be rationalized, and to do so you must acknowledge that the Bible does not spell out a clear sequence of creation, or of the time involved. Once you throw sequence and time from the creation stories, the Bible can easily be rationalized to allow for Evolution.
It is just so much easier to interpret the Bible in a way that allows God to be great enough to have created evolution first. The bottom line is that the Bible isn't a science text. It says WHO did it, not HOW.