RicOlie_2 said:

imperialscum said:

Frank your Majesty said:

If you don't take the bible literally, you can easily say that God creating earth and life in seven days was a way for people 2500 years ago to imagine how everything started. You can still believe in Heaven and Jesus dying for your sins. That's the essence of not taking something literally.

Of course, evolution is nowhere mentioned in the bible, but neither is electricity and yet, even members of the Westboro Baptist Church use electric light.

Yes I suppose you could twist everything around and fool yourself so that it somehow fits with the modern science. But for what reason would someone then even believe in such nonsense if he accepts science? Why not just take science and forget about the bed-time story level material?

If you think it's simply bedtime story material, then you display your ignorance of the story. The creation story in Genesis is a carefully crafted narrative that has some clearly symbolic elements woven into it. The order of the things created is definitely deliberate, and not the result of some primitive mind making up crap. The author(s) conveyed theological ideas through the story, and thus it has theological value, if not scientific value.

That being said, I agree with you that it is illogical to reject the latest scientific advances in favour of a primitive story completed only a few millennia ago.

I never got the impression that Genesis was intended to be interpreted any other way than literally. It comes across as a statement of fact, especially given that the Bible is usually very clear whenever symbolic stories are told. Not to mention that everyone in the entire Bible, both Old and New Testaments, clearly take the Genesis creation account to be a literal interpretation of how the earth came to be.