This question arose in a fairly general way in the discussion between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams in the Sheldonian Theatre the other day, so looking at what the archbishop had to say on the subject is as good a way into the subject as any. The question arose as to why the writers of sacred scripture, being inspired by god to write as they did, should have got the whole business of the origins of the universe and human life so completely wrong, if, indeed, it was god who inspired them. After all, if god did inspire them, and if, in fact, it would have been possible for god to reveal the secrets of the origin of the universe and life to the sacred writers, why did the writings inspired by god not achieve something that more nearly approximated to what we know from science about the origins of the universe and human beings? Here is the archbishop’s response:
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Anyway, back to the subject in hand. There is a problem lurking here, and the problem is this. It is simply absurd to suppose that the fact that we came to be as we are through the processes of evolution is not something that we needed to know. It simply won’t do to say that the important things that we should know are recorded in the first chapters of Genesis, and the reason is simple. Had we known, from the start, that human beings came to be in a process of evolution lasting billions of years, we would know something that is so important that it would have had to have been taken into consideration from the start — the fact, namely, that we are kin to every other form of living thing on the earth, and that we have a responsibility towards the life-world. We could not, then, have thought that the whole of this wondrous plenitude of living being on the earth had come about just for us, but that everything had its own niche, and that that is a vital thing for us to know.

Nor would we have thought, as is still very often the case, that the disasters that happen to us are in any way an expression of god’s attitudes towards us, or a punishment or warning for our misdoings. It’s very natural for us to wonder, when we have suffered some harm, whether an accident or sickness, what we did to deserve it. The book of Job, for instance, is a wonderful example of the attempt to discern, in the way the world works, whether there is any justice, and the conclusion seems to be that there is no justice at all so far as we can tell, and that all we can do is to submit ourselves to what happens without questioning its justice or injustice, for whatever reasons there might be are too exalted for us to understand. But this is something we needed to know, and if the inspired authors of the Bible had been told about the process of evolution from the start, we could have said, with a great deal of certainty, that the design of the world itself — we must suppose the design at this point, since this is something any self-respecting and responsible god would hold to be necessary information for self-conscious creaturres to know, creatures capable of learning about the world, and, in the archbishop’s words, responding to god’s call to relationship with him – that is to say, that the design included, as a necessary feature, how chance events bring about the most terrible suffering; and that that suffering has no transcendent meaning or purpose, but is built into the very structure of the system of origins. This is something we needed to know, and the supposition that the only things necessary for us to know have to do with sin and redemption is special pleading.

According to the archbishop, however, we needed to know none of this, and that is, quite frankly, a nonsense. We needed to know it because it is true. Just think of how much misunderstanding would have been avoided had our early ancestors been let in on this particular secret. Instead of wondering, desperately, why things have a tendency to go so badly, we would know, right from the start, that things were designed this way, that god had used the incredibly wasteful process of evolution to bring about life on the planet, and that we are latecomers on the scene, a scene which had already been a few billion years in the making, and one in which things were such as to go wrong, no matter what we might do. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t need to know that there are other harms, moral harms, that we are responsible for, but at least knowing about evolution, and the long process which preceded our arrival on the scene, would not have led to the wholly absurd notion that the limits of human compassion, and our tendency sometimes to tell lies, or to kill for personal advantage, and other moral faults, had cosmic significance, a supposed significance which, in fact, has led, not only to a disproportionate idea of the significance of human beings, but also to the many harms that we do simply because we differ in our understanding of what in fact this significance consists in.

http://choiceindying.com/2012/02/28/did-the-bible-get-it-wrong-the-hermeneutic-auction/