The Bible teaches that Jesus, the Word of God, specially created all things, including humanity (Gen 1, John 1:3).
Of humanity, God first created a man, named Adam, and then a woman, whom the man named Eve. God then breathed life into them.
They both lived for close to a thousand years, and had numerous children between them, some of whom are also named in scripture (Gen 4:1-2; Gen 4:25; Gen 5:3-4).
From these original people, all of us are descended.
In the New Testament, Paul and Jude confirm for us the accuracy of the records from Moses in the book of Genesis (Rom 5, 1 Tim 2, Jude 1:14).
The Bible also provides genealogical histories of some important individuals, all the way back to Adam and Eve. These people include Noah (Gen 5), Abraham (Gen 11), David (Gen 46, Ruth 4), and Jesus (Mat 1, Luke 3).
Adam and Eve were created in God's image, much like a self-portrait. God also gave them one rule that they needed to obey (Gen 2:17).
They broke that rule (Gen 3:6).
As a result, the world has been plunged into a less-than-perfect state, in which we have all been prisoners. The Bible tells us that even the ground itself was cursed as a result of the behavior of Adam and Eve (Gen 3:17-19).
In this imperfect world, our own selfish nature fights against our conscience at almost every turn. We cannot hope to obey every good and perfect rule of God (Rom 3:23).
Fortunately, God is fully aware of our inability to serve Him perfectly, and He loves us anyway (Rom 5:8).
Even though we disobey Him and make ourselves His enemy, He has decided to do everything necessary to fix this broken relationship that we have with the God who lovingly made us (John 3:16-17).
He has done this through His Son, Jesus.
To save us, Jesus took on the bad results, the penalties, for our bad behavior, even though He Himself, being God in the flesh, had never done any wrong. He did this in the same way that a very rich man might pay off the debt of a poor person (Rom 6:23; Luke 7:41-43).
The Bible teaches that if we confess with our mouths that Jesus Christ is Lord, and believe in our hearts that God raised Him from the dead, we will be saved (Rom 10:9).
If you have never asked Jesus to forgive you for your actions, He says that He is waiting for you with His arms open wide. (Rev 3:20)
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Human beings evolved by natural selection alone, about a hundred thousand years ago, from other intelligent ape-like animals that evolved from actual apes over the course of the preceding five million years or so. Apes in turn evolved from simpler life forms, which ultimately all evolved from the first living organism on earth over the course of more than three billion years.
That first life-form, which has since gone extinct (so we don't know what exactly it was like), was a simple self-replicating protein that arose from the random and accidental chaining of amino acids, which is a chemical that has a natural tendency to chain together, especially in conditions like those that would have existed in a few places on the early earth.
The earth and those amino acids came together at random about five billion years ago, as one among billions of trillions of different combinations of planets and stars and chemicals throughout the vast cosmos. Finally, all the physical forces, particles, and constants that came together about fourteen billion years ago (to make this huge cosmos, and all its random experimenting with planets and stars, over all the billions of years up to now, ultimately producing earth) in turn arose in a similarly inevitable way.
Why Do We Believe This?
That is how Naturalists understand the story of where we all came from, as it is how science has so far found it to be. There is considerable scientific evidence for the timespans involved and the forces and factors involved, so we're pretty sure about the general picture. But even where we can't access the evidence that we need to be sure, the theories scientists have proposed all work pretty well, make good predictions, and conform to what we already know. And Naturalists follow what scientists have found and conjectured about all these things, because science holds the highest standards of inquiry and evidence, and does not go beyond what we have good evidence to believe.
The story of how human beings evolved from hominids, and hominids from apes, and apes from other mammals, and so on, all the way back, without any intelligent meddling or guidance, is told in any good college-level textbooks on evolution and physical anthropology. The story of how life itself probably originated (for there are a number of theories) is told in several books on the origin of life by scientific experts on the subject. Since the field advances quickly, you should read any book on the origin of life written by a real scientist in the past ten years. The story of how the universe has evolved from a hot big bang to cool and condense into trillions of galaxies each with billions of stars and planets, of every conceivable variety, leading inevitably to a combination like our earth and solar system, is told in any college-level textbook on astrophysics or cosmology or any recent book on Big Bang theory.
God or Nature?
Everything in our story after the Big Bang is better secured by scientific facts than any other alternative. The most controversial aspect of the Naturalist view of how we got here, however, is our view of the origin of the universe. The story of how the Big Bang arose to produce our specific universe is where the most speculation lies, because there are so many different possibilities, and the one breakthrough that is needed to advance on this question (the unification of Relativity and Quantum theory) has yet to be made. I shall summarize only two of the leading theories that command the respect of expert cosmologists as plausible possibilities.
The Chaotic Inflation Theory holds that from an origin of pure random potential, every possible universe has arisen, all as one continually expanding megaverse, such that the regions of this megaverse different from ours are so far away from us that we can't see them. The Smolin Selection Theory holds that our universe is just one piece of a much larger multiverse, which either began from a completely random point of pure potential, or has always existed without beginning, but either way according to this theory every black hole has produced a new, randomly-organized universe inside it, and since many universes produce many more black holes, these all produce new universes inside them, and so on, so that every possible kind of universe exists or eventually will exist, all of them connected to each other through black holes.
Both theories entail that our universe, with exactly its particular set of physical forces, particles, and constants, exists as a result of blind, natural forces arising inevitably, because every possible combination has been or would have been tried by this natural process. As to why the megaverse or multiverse exists and has the peculiar properties it does, such as producing lots of universes, both theories begin by assuming the simplest brute fact possible: something that necessarily exists without explanation. This is identical to all "God did it" theories, which simply assume without further explanation that a particular God just happens to exist, except that the Naturalist theories posit a far simpler being than a god.
In addition, the Naturalist theories entail a universe exactly like ours, whereas no God theory entails the universe should be exactly like ours (a universe as large and old, a universe with so complex an array of subatomic particles with such a bizarre set of properties, and so on), and all God theories face problems explaining how God can exist when he has no place to be, or how he can act or think when there is no time to act or think, or how he can exist "before" the existence of time, and so on.
Naturalist theories encounter none of these problems: on either Chaotic Inflation or Smolin Selection, for example, the multiverse exists necessarily and does not come "from" anywhere. Even if it had a beginning, there was never a time or place when there was "nothing," for there has always been something, even from the very first moment and at every place there has ever been.
Apart from the fact that only Naturalist theories are actually trusted and studied by scientists, who are the most qualified to assess these things, and only Naturalist theories actually make testable predictions, what commends these theories over all others is the simplicity of their brute assumptions. A God, for example, must have a hugely fortunate and highly ordered coincidence of powers and abilities, many of which have never been observed and so we can't even say they exist at all.
At the very least, a God must have a completely bodiless mind, a supremely complex intelligence, an infinitely complex store of knowledge, an inexplicably convenient power to act and create out of thin air, and a complex personality with a complicated set of desires and character traits (like goodness, for example, and the desires to create a universe and life and people and so on). Thus, a God is an extremely complex theoretical entity, and why such an incredibly specific and complex being exists remains inadequately explained. And Naturalists believe we have no evidence such a being exists anyway.
By contrast, the Naturalist theories all start with an incredibly simple point of minimal space-time with a completely random potential to expand in any random way, within the constraints of a very basic physics. That's it. No other unexplained properties need be proposed. From that alone, the existence of our universe can be deduced, provided certain scientific theories and findings hold about the nature of matter-energy and space-time.
Conclusion:
The Naturalist answer to How We Got Here is quite simply that we are the lucky accidental byproduct of an inevitable natural megaverse. Though this means we were not created for any purpose, we have the good fortune of getting to choose a purpose for ourselves. Thus, Naturalists believe it is we who give the universe meaning, not the other way around.
To Learn More: Wikipedia on the Origin of Life
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