I apologize for the manner in which I posted but at the very least, the Earth had a beginning nearly 5 billion years ago, and this is not contested. As for the Big Bang Theory, it still is the predominant view among cosmologists to my understanding.
Of course that part is not contested. Nor is the Big Bang contested; the question is whether the Big Bang erupted from a singularity, or whether it has always existed as a quantum potential. We can only talk about our own universe, because we cannot (yet) determine if other universes exist and what the conditions are there. Note that we cannot talk about ‘before’ the Big Bang because ‘before’ is a time linked notion. Time is part of space time and that only came into existance during the Big Bang. You cannot do anything if there is no time in which to do it nor can you ‘do’ or be a thing that ‘does’ if you lack matter and energy. Both did not exist prior to the Big Bang. Now there are some theories that consider that prior to the Big Bang there was ‘time’ of sorts but there is no change as a result of time progressing as there is no matter or energy with which to initiate any changes. This is hypothesised simply because the laws of physics appear to be time immutable; they pay no attention to time.
Now if you want to pop god into that bit ‘before’ then it means the the universe held within it before it existed, before it emmited time, energy, mass etc a deity endowed with omnicience that was ‘separate’ before seperation and capable of ‘thinking’ and upon thinking ‘doing’ without matter or energy. It was capable of being something so omnicient (and apparently continues to be so, amused as it is by human affairs) even while using an unfathomably high use of energy (possibly more than the universe currently contains, violating the laws of conservation) and continues to do so.
Now I happen to think that what people try to do is ‘retrofit’ Christian teaching to fit into scientific understanding. And where god is found wanting, when we look for an explanation then god is endowed with qualities by his believers to always make sure he escapes both scrutiny and detection. Everything must be suspended to sustain that belief, or that ‘cause’
There are
huge consequences for Christianity when you actually understand what evolution means;
If you’re looking for the metaphor underneath the metaphor isn’t that perhaps a tacit acknowledgement that Genesis isn’t actually telling us anything? 
The main thrust of my argument was more on the latter half of what I posted earlier. But I’ll respond to your point. With respect to Genesis as a handy metaphor, there has never been an ‘idyll’ in the evolutionary sense. Genesis specifically mentions an idyll in which essentially we were both protected and secondly had command of the land around us (with the insinuation that man has had access to farming and had domesticated animals from the get go; an easy mistake to make given that Genesis is a facsimile of other Sumerian creation myths) We have always struggled against nature. If there is any ‘idyll’ in which people want for nothing and indeed are bombarded with comforts that they don’t actually need relatively speaking, contemporary society is pretty close! Our intelligence has led us towards an idyll, not away from it. In terms of gaining intelligence/knowledge and losing our ignorance, again Genesis fails as a metaphor. If we are made in the ‘image of god’, then with evolution in mind, Neanderthals were made almost in the image of god. At what point in our evolution does god decide that we are close enough to his likeness to be special? To touch very briefly on the ‘just so story’ part of Genesis, it’s worth noting that Gods ‘punishment’ for the snake in removing it’s legs made it a more effective hunter 
To touch on something I’ve argued before, the Neanderthals ritualistically buried their dead. They buried them with flowers and trinkets; offerings and gifts to the dead. More than likely they were involved in ritualistic and spiritualistic behaviour. But they were not human. DNA evidence suggests that Neanderthals and Sapiens diverged from a common ancestor some 400,000 years ago. If both us and the Neanderthals ritualistically buried their dead which is suggestive of spirituality (and I say ‘suggestive of’ for the same reason that early Homo Sapiens show the same traits) then our common ancestor, Heidelbergensis that may date as far back as 1.3 million years may also have done the same. We have less physical specimens that survive in a social setting but recent findings from Spain suggest that they may have been the first ‘Homo’ to bury their dead. They also knew how to make and use rudimentary paints. So potentially the emergence of spiritual awareness and ritual predates mankind as we know it by as much as 1 million years.
There’s something deceitful in suggesting that humans, in their current iteration, are somehow ‘first and finest’. Indeed, the latest line of thinking on Neanderthals is that they displayed their intelligence so aptly they were perceived as potential mates and effectively diluted their own line. Given that both Sapiens and Neanderthals were successfully mitigating the difficulties caused by environmental changes, they came into increasing contact with each other. We know from cave paintings that they were capable of abstract thought. Their brains were bigger than ours with larger parts devoted to vision and simple function in turn producing different thought processes and perceptions of the world. Place them in today’s context, without the pressures of immediate survival and it’s feasible that their brains would make a better or different ‘sense’ of things than ours currently do.
The Christian understanding of the universe and our place in it is left wanting. It’s even a terrible metaphor for the universe and our place in it. I think that evolution and our understanding of the formation of the universe really does challenge the tenets of the faith. However I can see in eastern philosophies, in strands of Hinduism, Buddhism etc some more nuanced (and accurate) thought and I think that’s exactly where TexasGurl was coming from.
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