Excellent! And thanks for not going into the knee-jerk mode that posts such as mine merely identify me as "not a real Christian."You bring up some very good ideas that got me thinking about the subject. With the scientific advancements we've made since Moses penned Genesis, it is rather obvious that the description on how God made the universe was not written in order to conform to modern science. While our science can neither prove nor disprove Genesis 1:1, the rest of the creation story clearly does not agree with our science. As I said, trying to make it do so is a futile endeavor indeed. However, I do think those who do are sincere and are at least convinced of the inerrancy of the Bible, and for that I have to respect them for that. Bible skeptics don't even make it out of the starting gate!
Having said that, I think we may want to consider how the science of 1,000 BC agreed or disagreed with Genesis. That is after all the era in which Moses wrote, and from that perspective Genesis is in total agreement with 1st milinnial BC science.
When we in modern time visualize the universe we see something like:
View attachment 43258
This is pretty much our world view and it certainly doesn't look like anything at all in Genesis. But what was their worldview, their science? Those in Ancient Middle Universe, including the Jews, visualized the universe something like:
View attachment 43259
The verse references in this diagram align perfectly with how those folks visualized the universe. Such an image was shared, not only by the Jews, but by all those who lived in the Ancient Near East. God wrote in terms they already understood. He saw no need to bring up the big bang. Their world started in a small garden but I see the language as saying that it was God's intent that the garden should eventually spread across the entire land. And yes, as far as the Jews were concerned, the earth was flat. In fact the word "earth" is almost always translated as "land" everywhere else it is used. It is the Hebrew word "erets." We in our time see the earth as a globe which aligns with our worldview depicted in the first image above. We know that because of relatively new instruments such as telescopes. But had you and I lived in the days of Moses it would be indisputable that the land was indeed flat. We'd just have to walk outside of our tent and look around. With the scientific instruments of our eyes, it would be obvious. Case closed!
Had God communicated the scriptures last year in New York or LA, I would think Genesis would have read quite differently that it does now. Perhaps God would have mentioned atoms, quarks, Quantum Mechanics, etc. I would imagine that if God waited until the 30th century to reveal Himself, the description of the universe may well be as different from our current view as ours is from Moses' view. Speculation of course, but not out of the realm of possibility. I have little doubt that science 1,000 years from now will unlock many secrets of the universe of which we can't presently even imagine.
In general, I don't think it was God's intention to explain exactly how He brought the universe into existence. I think that what He intended was to tell mankind that it was He that brought it into existence. That of course is fully divulged in Genesis 1:1. But what was the message He wanted to convey in rest of the creation story? Without going into a lot of detail, I think it was simply that He wanted to make a suitable habitat for humans to dwell together with Him in complete harmony. As such, I think God did a great job of communicating just that, and He did it in a way that spans both time and culture. Rather ingenious in my opinion.
The walking talking snake is another interesting little tidbit in Genesis. All I'll say about that is that even we in our modern days often call some human being a "rat" or, and more to the point, a "snake in the grass." I think we all understand the message such usage of words are meant to convey. I don't know for sure how they saw it, but it was probably at least close to how we see it. In any case, I seriously doubt they spent much time in discussing how snakes used to walk and talk. Again, that is conjecture on my part, but does it really matter on way or the other when considering God's overall plan for mankind? I think not.
Thanks for the discuccion.
I do find it uncanny that the Genesis account, especially in comparison to other ancient creation myths, meshes remarkably well with modern thinking. As you note, Genesis teaches the essential truth that we live in a God-designed and God-created universe with meaning and purpose. God created from nothing by His word - which accords beautifully with modern thinking in regard to idealism, consciousness-as-fundamental and (as ID proponent William Dembski suggests) information being foundational to reality. God said let there be light - voila, energy as foundational. God created in an orderly sequence that just happens to mesh quite nicely with evolutionary theory (even though I am not a gung-ho evolutionist). Even the account of Adam and Eve expresses fundamental truths about human nature that other ancient accounts just don't capture. Indeed, the other ancient accounts, while they can be profound, would typically seem laughable if anyone insisted on taking them literally today. In that sense, then, Genesis does indeed seem divinely inspired.
The problem is when believers in 2024 try to insist that the Bible must be read in terms of the ancient cosmology and that the ancient cosmology was in fact factually correct. Few would try to argue in favor of the Ancient Middle Universe as depicted in your illustration, so they opt for kind of a half-baked literalism like a 6,500-year-old earth.