What is there to reconcile? Would even an atheist deny that man is a fallen and corrupt creature? Would an atheist deny that man is the only creature endowed with a conscience and capable of good and evil(event tough most atheists and relativistic nihilists who believe these things to be only "concepts")?
Jesuit priest and nobel laureate Georges Lemaitre was the creator of the big bang theory, and like I said, traditional Christians were never scandalized by the ideas of Darwin and Lamarck(they were later scandalized by the eugenics movement, but that is another story). I don't know why the ignorant keep insisting that there is an elemental conflict between religion and scientific progress. There never was.
Would you mind explaining why it is your idea that a Catholic or Orthodox Christian would have any hardship reconciling his worldview with our current "knowledge about the universe"? The idea in itself seems quite absurd, but I guess for the most strident and fanatical followers of Dawkins the Westboro Baptist Church is the best representation of the Christian religious establishment.
Religion conflicts with science in so far as religious doctrines make truth claims about the empirical world. So, if it is your claim that mankind was created by some kind of "intelligent" entity, then that is a scientific hypothesis (it is a truth claim about the empirical world) and one for which there is an alternative and conflicting explanation in mainstream science, which is that life arose by abiogenesis and evolved by an undirected natural process. In fact the whole point of such scientific explanations is that they can explain how complexity arose, without the necessity of an even more complex set of causes.
So religious explanations are superfluous and given their lack of evidential support that implies they are almost certainly untrue - when you have a good explanation you don't need the bad one. Some religious people (including the pope) can accept that evolution must have happened, but they can't accept that it was undirected (which is really the whole point of the theory of natural selection) and many also balk at abiogenesis, because if life arose naturally from the substrate and conditions on the early earth, then it was not created. So the conflict is that science follows the evidence, whereas religion can only follow dogma (or self destruct): Even if religious people can have the flexibility to interpret much of the bible as allegory, there still must be a sticking point. And it is there that religion comes into conflict with science.
Modern cosmology just takes natural explanations further back, so that we now know the huge scale of the universe, which is quite different from the tiny, claustrophobic universe of a pre scientific religion with a central earth and pinpricks of light poking through a solid firmament, as described in genesis. Richard Feynman puts it well: “It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.”
And sure, human beings are corrupt, but the term "fallen" in Christianity implies that humanity was once in a higher state and later came down from that higher state by committing some "sin" or other, only to be redeemed by Jesus's self sacrifice. i.e. The nonsensical doctrine of atonement that is central to the Christian faith. That might have made some sense to a desert tribe that sacrificed goats to placate an angry Yahweh, but it doesn't now. And again it appears contrary to evidence, in that mankind was likely never in some higher state - evolution just doesn't work that way.
