"They would have perfectly well been able to understand a statement by God such as: 'Life arose from mud.' That would entirely encapsulate the evolutionary concept with out any scientific jargon. But this isn't what happened."
Well, now, let's not be hasty. The Bible says that God made man from the dust of the ground; the Hebrew word for dust also means mud. Perhaps God was trying to tell the authors that man evolved, but they didn't get the symbolism. After all, evolution is more than just "life arose from mud". Hence the scene in the Eden story where God fashions man like a sculptor working in clay instead of describing a divinely guided evolutionary process starting with mud.
In other words, part of the problem may just be that God tells us the whole truth, but we poor mortals simply don't understand what we are hearing, so we retell it in a way we can understand, a way that is mostly wrong in the details but contains kernels of divine truth.
Kevin L. O'Brien