If man evolved, it necessarily follows that somewhere in there, man did not have an immortal soul - which would mean that "our immortal souls evolved" - which is an obvious oxymoron.
>>To me, it all boils down to this: If the earth is millions of centuries old, that means that man evolved.
If man evolved, it necessarily follows that somewhere in there, man did not have an immortal soul - which would mean that "our immortal souls evolved" - which is an obvious oxymoron.<<
No, it does not. The substance which was our bodies may have been formed from dirt into the form of an animal, at which point our rational souls were breathed into one such animal and it became man.
Evolution explains the material aspect of our existence, only.
The two creation stories in Genesis (Genesis 1 and Genesis 3) cannot be taken as literal descriptions of creation. These accounts appear to be re-workings of older creation myths of that part of the world. But what Genesis says that is very important is this: We are not to worship the creation or the things in it -- We are to worship God the creator. For example, Genesis refers to the Sun and Moon as the "greater light" and the "lesser light" in the sky. The writer is deliberately avoiding the proper nouns because the proper nouns for the Sun and Moon were names of gods.
Another important feature of Genesis is that it shows God as caring for the people he has created, and it shows God being concerned with the moral and ethical behavior of his people. This is utterly unlike the surrounding pagan religions, where capricious gods needed to be propitiated with sacrifices, often cruel (including human sacrifice).
So, understood in this way, I believe in Genesis: we were created by a loving God who expects us to live as moral and ethical people obedient to his law and will. I would agree with you that a loving God would not create us without immortal souls. But I disagree with you that Genesis provides a scientific description of creation. If your faith depends on Biblical literalism/innerancy, your faith is on very shaky grounds.
Some evangelical fundamentalist apologetics is filled with often contrived attempts to reconcile inconsistencies and contradictions in scripture. The most contrived apologetics is creation science. But this is all unnecessary: we can read the Bible, especially the New Testament, and we certainly have enough to rely on concerning Christ and concerning salvation.
For example, try reading the Passion accounts in parallel. Timings and the like are not exactly the same. Should we be troubled by these minor contradictions? No! They indicate we have not one single account of the Passion, repeated four times, but instead four different accounts. Four different sources of information concerning this most important of historical events.
We know that Paul affirmed the reality of the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15), writing before 60 AD. Paul cannot have written that without having been in contact with the early Christian community he became a member of only several years after the resurrection. Paul is clearly repeating what he had been taught, just a few years after Christ's crucifixion.
There is no need to indulge in the magical thinking of Biblical inerrancy to base a strong faith on the scriptures. To teach inerrancy instead of the authority of the scriptures has no other effect but to scare intelligent people away from Christianity. Try reading athiest polemics one day, you'll see how they argue. They say things like "Acts says the number of believers was 140, at the same time Paul says that Jesus appeared to 500 brothers all at once -- that's a contradiction that makes Paul an unreliable witness." Obviously, they have decided that because there are (minor) inconsistencies in the New Testament, the New Testament is unworthy of belief. The athiests think this way because they have been taught to think that way by rigid Biblical literalists! (Most of the athiests you'll read are former fundamentalists.) My own faith was destroyed by this when I was in my late teens. I didn't recover my faith until my late 20s, when I became aware that Christianity is not bibliolatry.
Why does this follow? Couldn't the very first entities to evolve into man hvae been "ensouled"?