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For what it’s worth, here’s my take on some of the issues you’ve been debating:

I believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God — who does not lie and whose will is perfect — and that all parts of His word are suitable for learning, for instruction, for exhortation, and for correction. Further, I believe the Bible is inerrant. Even though people may make an effort to distort it and repackage it in popular contemporary terms, God’s will cannot be frustrated by human effort and His will is that we should have His Word for our instruction and for our guidance and comfort.

I believe that some parts of the Bible were clearly given to us for instruction through parables, while others were given as song and poetry, and still other sections as a historic accounting or factual recording of events that transpired. While many parts of the bible are to be read and understood literally (e.g. “They melted their earrings and made a golden calf), they may still have extended application in contemporary terms (e.g.”Is there a golden calf in my life?”). This use of personal metaphor is not, however, the same thing as encountering a troublesome passage (e.g. “They abandoned the natural use of women”) and deciding to coyly avoid God’s intended meaning, call the verse “a metaphor” and then proceed to repackage His word in contemporary easily digestible terms.

On that same note, I believe that Adam and Eve were real people. There is no indication anywhere in the Old Testament that named figures should be understood as allegorical symbols simply because their stories are difficult for us to understand in contemporary terms. God doesn’t lie, and His message has come to us exactly as He intended it should.

And so I come back to evolution, and why I’ve taken such care in my posts and in my exchange with js1138 to caution against turning to science — and ESPECIALLY - to “evolution” to fill in what we believe are “gaps” in the Biblical account:

Scripture tells us that God exists outside of time and that His ways are not our ways. The God I know and love and worship is of such supernatural magnitude that He could easily have created the earth in a blink of His eye had it been His will to do so. He could easily have created an earth that looks billions of years old and yet is far younger - who knows what old and young look like in the hands of a supernatural Creator who also created the very laws by which we measure such things?

These things are not for us to spend our time picking apart. Jesus gave us the Great Commission, and once saved and adopted as heirs to God’s Kingdom we are — as Paul exhorts us — to “redeem the time” by “looking to heaven” and not to the things of the world.

Yet...

Many people...many, many people today just don’t trust God to be that great. We just can’t rest easy with the “Ours is not to wonder why, ours is but to do or die...” simplicity of trusting that God has told us all we need to know.

This includes many saved Christians. We love God, and we know He’s pretty awesome...but...we just aren’t sure — bombarded as we are by the culture around us, which HAS set up science as a false god — that God really is capable of Creation in the way that Genesis lays out.

We start wondering, and there is plenty in the world today to...bedevil us, if I might use a deliberately loaded terms...to encourage us to wonder and quietly doubt. Maybe Adam really wasn’t a real person...maybe a day was just the ancient Hebrews way of conveying an eon...maybe people evolved and Adam was just some downstream starting point for the allegory...maybe geologic time and the rise and fall of the dinosaurs does fit somewhere in there between “On the first day...” and “....then He rested”.

And, there’s the devil in it for those of us who are Christians. We should know better than that. We DO know better than that. When we start trying to add to His word to accommodate “evolution”, what we are really doing is doubting God’s ability to be who He is — that is, the Alpha and Omega...the one who exists outside of time...the one who can breathe life into dust and fill the oceans from the mists with just a thought.

We, the created, are simply trying to reach up and put the Creator in a man-made box of known dimensions so that we can better understand the world...but more than, so that we can validate our understanding of our place in it. Furthermore, we are doubting His perfection: Evolution is not about perfection; it is a notion that trades in chance, chaos, uncertainty, and has no interest in goals. When we suggest that perhaps God’s act of creation was carried out through evolution, we are suggesting that God operates through chance and chaos. Yet, while these are certainly under His authority, they are not His mode of operation and they are completely incompatible with His character, as revealed all throughout Scripture.

Again, from the perspective of one who has walked in the full embrace of secular humanism and come home again to trust in God and salvation in Jesus Christ...I pray that we will all consider carefully what we believe about evolution — and why we believe it — and make sure we understand what that says for what we believe about God.