I think the question deserves a careful answer. From the standpoint of science, we know that a Big Bang happened 13.78 billion years ago. The first and second chapters of Genesis contain two different creation accounts – the one in the first chapter is “out front” while the second one is buried in the fine print, but it’s there – slightly different sequence, and shorter.
Conclusion? I take it that the Big Bang was GOD saying “Let there be light,” and from the first three verses of the Gospel of John that ‘speech’ as it were was the breath, i.e. Holy Spirit, releasing the the Word to carry out the act of creation. Our little three pound chemical computers may attempt to draw a picture using current notions of what that must have been like, but nobody I know has both a) declared victory on the topic and b) had the tiniest idea of what he or she was talking about.
Suffice it to say that “in the fulness of time” involved two hundred sextillion stars (current best estimate of the knowable universe) and 13.78 billion years just to reach the point where this planet formed and evolved homo sapiens, following which we developed ‘lore’ about what the naked eye could see in the skies.
In Job, GOD asks where Job was when HE put the stars in place and gave them their names. Allowing GOD to take credit for those names isn’t that far off the mark, because when HE said “the stars speak” HE meant that earlier prophecies HE had inspired Jewish prophets to utter (Isaiah has a major assortment) would find their announcement in the heavens. The Jewish New Year, for one, involves the skies.
Sorry to take so long, forgive the digression. One, GOD loves, in a way and to an extent that defies our imagination to encompass. Two, GOD decided to create a universe and (or in order to) put humans in it. Three, humans who quibble with God over exactly how He reveals Himself to us (Genesis 1 is a deed of title, not a complex and literal self-revelation) and over His sense of timing (six thousand years vs 13.78 billion, a 3.2 million to 1 ratio) is folly.
Here we are, evolved, and imperfect. Looking at it one way, GOD created us to have free will and calculating minds. This way madness lies, if you want us to simultaneously be perfect. In short, GOD accepted man’s inevitable ‘bad karma’ – and in the fullness of time Jesus was born.
He preached, healed, raised from the dead, fed thousands, walked on water – – – and suffered the consequences of everyone’s imperfections, their so-called bad karma, by dying in agony and utter isolation on the cross (“My God, my god, why have you forsaken me?” – the opening line of Psalm 22, a shorthand used in those days to “read into the record” an entire psalm.) For that final day he suffered aloneness that surpasses anything a human can imagine. He was despised, tormented, and suffered bodily death in our place, and utterly cast out from the Father.
We are perfectible, but only through acknowledging our need, our imperfectness, and asking for His forgiveness. He paid our price, out of love. “Greater love hath no man that one who will lay his life down for another,” – and greater love hath no GOD than one who will suffer human death for his beloved children, to bring them past evolution to perfection, and eternal adoption into Heaven.
Hope this helps.
Oh, and Another Thing 