Jobar

When the books of the Bible were written, science, for all intents and purposes, did not exist.

However, I think it's fair to state that the Bible was meant to be, in part, a book of explanations. Of course the explanations offered are outmoded by 2,000+ years. Those explanations are as a stone hand axe compared to the chainsaw of science.

MrDarwin

Even the most literalist Christians accept so much in the Bible as figurative or allegorical that I'm really puzzled as to why they interpret the creation stories of Genesis as they do.

emotional

All right, I stand corrected: the Bible is not a book of science, since it does not apply the scientific method. It is meant to be a book of real-world facts and theories, though, and therein it necessarily collides with what the scientific method has to say.

Never, neither as an atheist nor as a fundamentalist (Orthodox Jewish) theist, did I think Genesis 1 was to be read any other way than literally. There's simply nothing in the Genesis creation stories that hints of their being allegories. The story of Adam and Eve and the snake and the apple is different. Here I believed or disbelieved in it as an allegory in both my periods. Judaism can afford to look at Genesis 1 as allegory (and it does, in the Qabbalistic literature all over), but Christianity can't easily do it, because of the theological necessity of the Fall and Curse (an allegorical Fall and Curse would mean an allegorical hell, which is useless in converting people. In order to get a world religion, you need a literal hell of sadistic torture to scare people into converting).

Vicar Philip

When I was a Christian, I always tried to think about Adam & Eve as possibly being two microbes, two primitive organisms, whatever, to justify the story of Creation. This was to satisfy my science-leaning brain, and quite a stretch at that.

If we were to say Creation is only allegorical, at what point in time can we say, Ah, here is where we crawled up out of the ocean. Ah, here is where we became distinct from our ape-like common ancestor.

It seems more likely to this feeble minded poster that the writer(s) of Genesis was referring to what they thought were actual people. Why else would they go to the trouble of naming them?