Jaw, jaw: Can you spot the design defect? 

Can one believe in evolution and God? Some people of faith and some scientists agree: "No." They are wrong. The theory of evolution says that organisms are related by descent from common ancestors. Over time, organisms change and diversify as they adapt to different environments. Species that share a recent common ancestor are more similar to each other than species whose last common ancestor is more remote. Thus, humans and chimpanzees are, in configuration and genetic make-up, more similar to each other than they are to baboons, elephants or kangaroos.

If humans came about by evolution, then the Bible isn't wrong when it says that humans were created in the image of God.

Science has many other theories besides evolution. The heliocentric theory says that the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa. The atomic theory says that all matter is made up of atoms. And astronomy teaches us that the galaxies expand in space and that stars and planets form over time. Scientists agree that the evolutionary origin of plants and animals is a scientific conclusion beyond reasonable doubt. They place it beside such established notions as the roundness of the earth, its revolution around the sun and the atomic composition of matter. That evolution has occurred is, in ordinary language, a fact, not just a theory.

Many Biblical scholars have rejected a literal interpretation of the Bible as untenable because it contains mutually incompatible statements, if they are taken as scientific. The beginning of Genesis presents two different creation stories. Extending through chapter one and the first verses of chapter two is the six-day narrative, in which God creates human beings — both "male and female" — in His own image on the sixth day, after creating light, earth, firmament, fish, fowl and cattle.

In Genesis 2:4, a different narrative starts: God first creates a male human, then plants a garden and creates the animals and only then proceeds to take a rib from the man to make a woman. Which one of the two narratives is correct and which one is in error? Neither contradicts the other, if we understand the two narratives as conveying the same message, that the world was created by God and that humans are His creatures.

There are numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible. For example, in the description of the return from Egypt to the promised land by the chosen people of Israel, not to mention erroneous factual statements about the sun circling the earth and the like. Is the Bible "wrong"?