Do you believe Genesis 1 is the record of God preparing Eden for human habitation in six literal 24-hour days?

Yes, it just seems so difficult to find other positions in the text without importing them. I have read widely the Intelligent Design material and like it, certainly serves a good purpose, but different than the creationist model of Genesis 1. I get concerned when we accept as givens premises that seem out of tune with Scripture. Yet I also recognize people’s genuine concerns about extreme apparent age. So I respect friends who hold to the gap theory and day age and the variants, and appreciate their insistence on inspiration. Yet when I listen to Hugh Ross and others, including Walter Kaiser, I’m still left feeling it’s obvious that no one would ever have come up with such interpretations except to solve a problem. And how many problems of one era disappeared on their own, only to leave believers with a strange biblical interpretation the text doesn’t and never did support?

I particularly cringe when I hear evangelicals view Genesis 1-11 as poetry or allegory and talk about God using macroevolution to “create” the first man and woman, which is basically “stick a soul in a sufficiently evolved primate.” What are the implications of Jesus and his obvious belief in first man and woman, and Paul’s “we all sinned in Adam”? If God created Eve out of Adam, then that is an explicit disproof of God choosing two primates to honor as “first man and first woman.” If Paul was wrong, then so much for inspiration. If Jesus was wrong, so much for salvation. Yet, I know evangelicals, including some prominent influencers, who though they avoid saying some of these things publicly, nonetheless believe them privately, or at least consider then viable positions. But without the biblical doctrine of creation, there is no doctrine of redemption.

Photo by Brett Jordan