I think you need to explain why you think it might be incompatible with your faith in order to respond to any such concerns. There’s obviously a ton that could be said, but if you just look at the face of the Genesis account, it is striking that whereas God created a number of things ex nihilo (using the Hebrew verb “bara,” which means creation from nothing), when it comes to living organisms, He expressly made the creation through the mediation of apparently natural processes (e.g., ordering the land to produce vegetation rather than creating the first plants from scratch, as it were). If, like me, you read the Hebrew word “Yom” (commonly translated into English as “day” in this context) as literally meaning a long period of time, as is one of the literal meanings of the word in biblical Hebrew, then an evolutionary account (which can, but need not, incorporate an “intelligent design” component) seems perfectly natural to me.
I’m not a scholar of Augustine, but my general understanding is that he, long before there was any scientific motivation to do so, construed the Genesis account as including a vaguely evolutionary history of life on Earth, with the modern diversity of living forms being descended from initially created, biologically simple “germs.” (I certainly don’t think Augustine had anything to say about the mechanism of natural selection, though.)
Best regards,
CThomas
