Thanks, Joel! Great job walking us through your journey. I was convinced of "young earth" through the 90s, helped by a biology major buddy (I was a math guy) who liked Behe's Darwin's Block Box book. But then one day he told me that Behe's book didn't stand up to review and that he was rethinking the whole thing. That conversation sent me on my journey of checking out the theology and science for myself. Like you, I eventually encountered Walton, Scott McKnight and Joshua Swamidass. I probably landed in about the same place as you as well. One fun part about the journey is that I fell in love with reading or watching content about human origins from a scientific perspective! Another fun piece of the journey is that I get way more out of Genesis 1 - 11 these days, helped along by folks like The Bible Project. The idea that the writers of those chapters were doing some really cool theology, with way more depth than I had ever imagined, and not just reporting events was a game changer for me. Last thing: I'm glad you're sharing this. It's still really important. There are still preachers, leaders, teachers, mentors, parents, etc. that make it difficult for young people to follow Jesus by insisting on interpretations that the young people themselves can see is non-sense, because they understand the science better than their teachers, mentors and parents. This false dichotomy presented to young people puts them in a bind about whether they think they can follow Jesus. So well done! May God lead young Christians with a mind for science to people who can help them out of the false dichotomy!!
Thanks for sharing your journey Joel. You are using an open-minded evaluation of hypotheses and the credibility of the evidence supporting the claims. I was a Christian decades ago and went through a similar process. Many years from now, I believe you are going to look back with a satisfied smile. Good luck on your journey!
I remember when I first started investigating the bible seriously. 20 years of hard study, multiple theology changes, and a degree in biblical theology later, and I lost my faith completely and am an atheist.
Hi, Joel. I really respect how you share your path with people and also the sophisticated thought process you disclose in doing so. I think of myself as a progressive traditional Jew (or something like that), so I would continue to push on the question of why the narratives specifically about human beings in Genesis 1-3 need to be very historical or literal. I don't have a problem, in principle, believing that the origin of what we call "modern humans" began four to six thousand years ago. But that's quite different from believing in a literal garden of Eden, with a woman literally built from the man's rib (or side), and a literal talking snake, with a literal fiery, revolving sword stationed outside the garden, and so forth. I do take those chapters of Genesis as revealing profound, divine truths about the human condition. But I think they are about all of us, not a specific couple per se. By the way, understandings of Genesis are absorbed by os-moses 3:33 😉
A book on creation that you missed: _Hymns on Paradise_ by St. Ephrem the Syrian, composed in Aramaic in the 4th century AD, which interprets the earliest chapters of Genesis is a very different and non - literal way, thus showing that there is not just one way to understand the story of creation, and raising the question of whether Genesis itself was intended any more than St. Ephrem's _Hymns_ to depict creation as it literally happened (which no man was witness to) or to impress upon our minds theological and moral truths.
I sympathize with your journey. I think you're off track trying to make the fall into sin concordant with biological heredity. On a related note, have you gone to the Stated Clearly channel and watched the presentation on endogenous retroviruses?
When I first heard the 10,000 minimum for a genetic population used as an argument for evolution, my reaction, which is somewhat obvious is: How in the world can an initial population of 10,000 be explained by anything but a simultaneous special creation? Pushing back the goalposts to human predecessors doesn't solve the problem because one must explain the origin of that diversity in a recognizably human population as a question of the genetic fixation of mutations which by their very nature must trace to a single individual in order for them to be inheritable. To posit simultaneous genetic fixation not just of a single trait, but numerous traits, across a minimum of 10,000 individuals strains credulity to put it mildly.
Bishop Ussher calculated the age of the earth as 4004 BC "with quite a bit of precision." - Based on the KJV Bible (so not the LXX), this is not really hard to do. I did it myself when I was about 15 or 16, but if we think the biblical writers were trying to reveal to us the age of the earth, or that this was a concern of theirs at all, then we have misunderstood their true aims.
The wild aurochs went extinct during the lifetime of George Washington, and from time to time the bones of some extinct animal would be extricated from the soil by chance, so certainly it was understood that species could go extinct, but they probably reasoned that if animals go extinct from time to time, yet there are still lots species in existence, then the earth could not be very old or there would be very few species left. BTW, evolutionary theory was much older than Darwin, but it had few adherents before Darwin hit upon the idea of natural selection as an explanatory mechanism. An Arabic scholar also had Darwin's idea in ninth century AD Baghdad, but it was too early or in the wrong place and therefore just never caught on that early.
Hello brother, I was wondering if you had any book recommendations on death before the fall? Early Genesis stuff.. understanding the fall and sin.. etc. I have the lost world series but wanting to read more than just Walton. Thanks in advance love the channel. God bless.
Hi Joel! I really enjoyed this video. I appreciate the nuance and attention to detail that you bring to the table. Would you consider reading/reviewing the book "Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church's Debate on Same-Sex Relationships" by James Brownson? This is an affirming book that many claim rebutes the traditionalist interpretations on the "clobber" passages. (I myself am a traditionalist.) I am curious to hear your thoughts on it!
Did you go to Taylor, and were you at IU for grad school? I live in Bloomington. Anyway, the Tomistic Institute has some interesting videos on the topic of science and the Bible. They have a lot more than just videos about Adam and Eve and evolution, including a really good one of the Catholic who first suggested the big bang theory. Last year I read John C. Collins' book Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? It was pretty good and leaves room for a few possibilities. Another interesting podcast, the Spiritually Incorrect podcast interviews people from both sides.
Can I just point out that if you consider DNA to be genetic material, you carry genetic material in your cells that go back in an unbroken line all the way to the first eukaryotes. So yes, you do carry genetic material from your ancestors. That is what common ancestry is. If that line had broken anywhere between then and now, you wouldn't exist. Yes, it has changed over the millenia, perhaps to the point where it is completely different than the original. But you can go back, step by step, to parent, to grandparent, to great-grandparent, and so on, and eventually arrive at the first eukaryotic cell.
“Cells” most likely. Genetic self replicating polymers would have been competing in a population for evolution to take hold enough for anything recognizable as a cell to develop.
@@isidoreaerys8745 It may be a bit much to ask that several eukaryotic cells came into being at exactly the same time. However, that's a small quibble. The fact remains that the DNA we carry in our cells is in an unbroken line from those ancient eukaryotic cells. An amazing thing, really.
But you cannot carry genetic material from EVERY ancestor. Let us take you. Each of your children will inherit only half your genes (although not entirely the same half). Each grandchild will inherit a quarter, each ggchild an eighth, etc. The seventh generation will inherit less than one percent of your genes, and in an additional eight generations each of your descendants will be lucky to inherit a single gene from you. Of course, this scenario ignores inbreeding which increases the likelihood that some of their genes will be inherited directly from you, but it does show that you likely have some individuals in your family tree from whom you inherited no genes at all. Put another way, you have about 20,000 protein coding genes, but in the last 14 generations you had more than 20,000 total ancestors, so more ancestors than genes! (Of course, some of these ancestors were undoubtedly the same people, the missing branches problem, but still, going far enough back you are likely to have more than 20,000 UNIQUE ancestors so that you could not inherit genes from each one.)
I converted early last year. I've always conflated young earth adherants to flat earthers, just kind of calling them ridiculous. I had looked into flat earth claims and evidence and watched debates and it just doesn't stand up. I kinda of realized last year that I wasn't familiar with young earth argumentation beyond genesis. So I began watching debates and researching their claims. They kind of made some good points, I think the turning point for me was with the dating of rock layers, namely on the large amount of assumptions that they start with. So I admit that I went on youtube looking for people who were directly refuting that specific young earth point, and they did not do a great job. Then it all began to fall apart for me over the next few months of researching this topic. Now I have the dubious honor of holding one of the most unpopular views imaginable where people automatically lable you as an idiot, which is fitting because that's what I had done to YEC people before even knowing their argumentation.
Geology girl has some exhaustive explanations of radiometric dating. Most of the counterapologists on UA-cam are biology oriented so it helps to hear it from a geologist.
Age of Rocks is a new YT channel that does a good job explaining radiometric dating and some of the hijinks YECs. There is a hefty PDF titled Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective that you should look at. Quite simply, and I mean this without insult, if you researched radiometric dating and came to the conclusion that the YEC crowd are correct you did not do a good job with your research. They are quite obviously incorrect.
I believe the Genesis account. That is mainly why I don't hold tightly to Young Earth. Read Verse 1 and verse 2. And the rest why would you think the earth is young?
@@danhoff4401 I researched for quite some time and I was intellectually set against it, in fact I deliberately looked for geologists to refute it, so I don't know how I could have stacked the deck any more against YEC. And you've sort of proven my point, kind stranger, that believing the earth is young automatically labels you as an idiot. Not saying you did that (I definitely thought of all of them as intellectual goofballs and dismissed them as obviously wrong), but what you have done is automatically assumed that my research was poor. There is a very real stigma against this view.
@@logic8673 Gen 1 and 2 do require a young earth. The creation of animals doesn't line up with the traditionally accepted fossil record, or cosmological evolution, or the fact that an old earth requires death before Adam sins. If there was no true first Adam then Jesus isn't the second Adam. It's far too much to talk about over a youtube comment, but an old earth theologically decimates the bible.
Where does Mark 10:16 fit into your outlook? But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ( ἀπὸ δὲ ἀρχῆς κτίσεως ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ ἐποίησεν αὐτούς·) What did Yeshua think that meant in late 2nd Temple Judaism? What did Mark think that meant when he rendered these words into koine Greek, still in 2nd Temple days. I grew up as a default reductionist materialist, interested in "science" as interpreted by modern "Big Science." Through a lot of struggle, I came out of "functional atheism" to faith in an Almighty creator, then later in Yeshua (Jesus), and then later, that the earth may not be as old as reductionist materialist "Big Science" wants everyone to believe. There is enough water on earth to cover the surface by something like a mile and a half, if all land was flattened and the Marianna Trench was filled in. In my opinion, recent creation cannot be divorced from the possiblity of a universal, world-wide flood. So ignoring the evidence for a world-wide flood will doubltess affect how one thinks of young or old creation. Best wishes on your journey.
Joel, you need to read C.J. Collins: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary about God "taking a man" and placing him in the Garden. If you reside in England and/or English ancestry then you need go back only 600-800 to find you are descended from a King of England. The further back you go the more common ancestors you share. If we go back 6000 years it is not outrageous to claim all are descended from Adam and Eve. What is more is that we have so much DNA in common with each other that it is very hard to claim we have not inherited any DNA from a particular ancestor -- we just can't prove where the DNA came from. We all can trace our Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA to a single people. There is no Y-chromosome crossing over in the gametes. If there was a real Adam, placed in a Garden by God, who went on to sire the Biblical patriarchs, then we have his Y-chromosome.
How do you handle the mounting evidence that Homo sapiens go back further than 200,000 years? Also how do you handle the genetic and archeological evidence that Homo sapiens had offspring with Neanderthals much further back than 6,000 years ago? I’m sure you must have looked into this evidence at some point in your journey and reconciled this data with your view!
I think you are missing archeological and anthropological realities that make implausible the idea that we could have emerged from a couple 4-6,000 years ago. To accept this view, you are going to have to grapple with things like the aborigines of Australia and their time lines that go much further than that into the past. At some point you’ll need to define who is and isn’t “human” in order for this timeline to work with evolution. Same issue William Craig has run into. I agree with Pete Enns and others who have pointed out that the whole book of Genesis appears to be a commentary on Israel and the formation of the monarchy. I also agree with Pete when he says Paul of course would have thought Adam was a historical person. He’d have no reason not to. I think many Christians are tied to the idea of original sin and a fallen creation and therefore need the Adam story…which honestly makes for an immoral and theologically complicated idea like original sin. Next thing you know you have Calvinist’s claiming God takes great pleasure seeing even babies in Hell. No. Instead, it seems far more likely the creation story is a statement of a belief that God made and ordered creation, that men are somehow closer than other animals to the image of God and that man’s quest for knowledge ultimately leads to a loss of innocence and a disconnection from the God of life. No need to throw Adam or Eve under the bus and Christ and His work is eternally relevant. One last consideration that I am not sure you if you’ve looked into yet is what to make of continuous evolution. How does the acknowledgement that evolution is taking place today inform your views of creation?
how much did they know about evolution at time the gospels were written? once you understand that and not mix it up with the fictional divine, you will understand that you're trying to make bronze age men sound smarter than the body of knowledge amassed since those early times. evolution is a fact, and we've proven it and been able to formalize our knowledge about it. you want to say that the book that mentions talking donkeys and snakes etc has the real deal about it. sounds plausible, lol
Interesting and thoughtful story. Thanks for reading my book, and I'm glad that it had such an impact on you!
Thanks, Joel! Great job walking us through your journey. I was convinced of "young earth" through the 90s, helped by a biology major buddy (I was a math guy) who liked Behe's Darwin's Block Box book. But then one day he told me that Behe's book didn't stand up to review and that he was rethinking the whole thing. That conversation sent me on my journey of checking out the theology and science for myself. Like you, I eventually encountered Walton, Scott McKnight and Joshua Swamidass. I probably landed in about the same place as you as well.
One fun part about the journey is that I fell in love with reading or watching content about human origins from a scientific perspective! Another fun piece of the journey is that I get way more out of Genesis 1 - 11 these days, helped along by folks like The Bible Project. The idea that the writers of those chapters were doing some really cool theology, with way more depth than I had ever imagined, and not just reporting events was a game changer for me.
Last thing: I'm glad you're sharing this. It's still really important. There are still preachers, leaders, teachers, mentors, parents, etc. that make it difficult for young people to follow Jesus by insisting on interpretations that the young people themselves can see is non-sense, because they understand the science better than their teachers, mentors and parents. This false dichotomy presented to young people puts them in a bind about whether they think they can follow Jesus. So well done! May God lead young Christians with a mind for science to people who can help them out of the false dichotomy!!
Thanks for sharing your journey Joel. You are using an open-minded evaluation of hypotheses and the credibility of the evidence supporting the claims. I was a Christian decades ago and went through a similar process. Many years from now, I believe you are going to look back with a satisfied smile. Good luck on your journey!
I’m so glad you’re making these videos Joel.
I remember when I first started investigating the bible seriously. 20 years of hard study, multiple theology changes, and a degree in biblical theology later, and I lost my faith completely and am an atheist.
Hi, Joel. I really respect how you share your path with people and also the sophisticated thought process you disclose in doing so. I think of myself as a progressive traditional Jew (or something like that), so I would continue to push on the question of why the narratives specifically about human beings in Genesis 1-3 need to be very historical or literal. I don't have a problem, in principle, believing that the origin of what we call "modern humans" began four to six thousand years ago. But that's quite different from believing in a literal garden of Eden, with a woman literally built from the man's rib (or side), and a literal talking snake, with a literal fiery, revolving sword stationed outside the garden, and so forth. I do take those chapters of Genesis as revealing profound, divine truths about the human condition. But I think they are about all of us, not a specific couple per se. By the way, understandings of Genesis are absorbed by os-moses 3:33 😉
A book on creation that you missed: _Hymns on Paradise_ by St. Ephrem the Syrian, composed in Aramaic in the 4th century AD, which interprets the earliest chapters of Genesis is a very different and non - literal way, thus showing that there is not just one way to understand the story of creation, and raising the question of whether Genesis itself was intended any more than St. Ephrem's _Hymns_ to depict creation as it literally happened (which no man was witness to) or to impress upon our minds theological and moral truths.
These videos are great thanks for sharing them.
I sympathize with your journey. I think you're off track trying to make the fall into sin concordant with biological heredity. On a related note, have you gone to the Stated Clearly channel and watched the presentation on endogenous retroviruses?
When I first heard the 10,000 minimum for a genetic population used as an argument for evolution, my reaction, which is somewhat obvious is: How in the world can an initial population of 10,000 be explained by anything but a simultaneous special creation? Pushing back the goalposts to human predecessors doesn't solve the problem because one must explain the origin of that diversity in a recognizably human population as a question of the genetic fixation of mutations which by their very nature must trace to a single individual in order for them to be inheritable. To posit simultaneous genetic fixation not just of a single trait, but numerous traits, across a minimum of 10,000 individuals strains credulity to put it mildly.
Bishop Ussher calculated the age of the earth as 4004 BC "with quite a bit of precision." - Based on the KJV Bible (so not the LXX), this is not really hard to do. I did it myself when I was about 15 or 16, but if we think the biblical writers were trying to reveal to us the age of the earth, or that this was a concern of theirs at all, then we have misunderstood their true aims.
The wild aurochs went extinct during the lifetime of George Washington, and from time to time the bones of some extinct animal would be extricated from the soil by chance, so certainly it was understood that species could go extinct, but they probably reasoned that if animals go extinct from time to time, yet there are still lots species in existence, then the earth could not be very old or there would be very few species left. BTW, evolutionary theory was much older than Darwin, but it had few adherents before Darwin hit upon the idea of natural selection as an explanatory mechanism. An Arabic scholar also had Darwin's idea in ninth century AD Baghdad, but it was too early or in the wrong place and therefore just never caught on that early.
Hello brother, I was wondering if you had any book recommendations on death before the fall? Early Genesis stuff.. understanding the fall and sin.. etc.
I have the lost world series but wanting to read more than just Walton. Thanks in advance love the channel. God bless.
Hi Joel! I really enjoyed this video. I appreciate the nuance and attention to detail that you bring to the table.
Would you consider reading/reviewing the book "Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church's Debate on Same-Sex Relationships" by James Brownson? This is an affirming book that many claim rebutes the traditionalist interpretations on the "clobber" passages. (I myself am a traditionalist.) I am curious to hear your thoughts on it!
Did you go to Taylor, and were you at IU for grad school? I live in Bloomington. Anyway, the Tomistic Institute has some interesting videos on the topic of science and the Bible. They have a lot more than just videos about Adam and Eve and evolution, including a really good one of the Catholic who first suggested the big bang theory. Last year I read John C. Collins' book Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? It was pretty good and leaves room for a few possibilities. Another interesting podcast, the Spiritually Incorrect podcast interviews people from both sides.
Can I just point out that if you consider DNA to be genetic material, you carry genetic material in your cells that go back in an unbroken line all the way to the first eukaryotes. So yes, you do carry genetic material from your ancestors. That is what common ancestry is. If that line had broken anywhere between then and now, you wouldn't exist. Yes, it has changed over the millenia, perhaps to the point where it is completely different than the original. But you can go back, step by step, to parent, to grandparent, to great-grandparent, and so on, and eventually arrive at the first eukaryotic cell.
“Cells” most likely.
Genetic self replicating polymers would have been competing in a population for evolution to take hold enough for anything recognizable as a cell to develop.
@@isidoreaerys8745 It may be a bit much to ask that several eukaryotic cells came into being at exactly the same time. However, that's a small quibble. The fact remains that the DNA we carry in our cells is in an unbroken line from those ancient eukaryotic cells. An amazing thing, really.
But you cannot carry genetic material from EVERY ancestor. Let us take you. Each of your children will inherit only half your genes (although not entirely the same half). Each grandchild will inherit a quarter, each ggchild an eighth, etc. The seventh generation will inherit less than one percent of your genes, and in an additional eight generations each of your descendants will be lucky to inherit a single gene from you. Of course, this scenario ignores inbreeding which increases the likelihood that some of their genes will be inherited directly from you, but it does show that you likely have some individuals in your family tree from whom you inherited no genes at all. Put another way, you have about 20,000 protein coding genes, but in the last 14 generations you had more than 20,000 total ancestors, so more ancestors than genes! (Of course, some of these ancestors were undoubtedly the same people, the missing branches problem, but still, going far enough back you are likely to have more than 20,000 UNIQUE ancestors so that you could not inherit genes from each one.)
I converted early last year. I've always conflated young earth adherants to flat earthers, just kind of calling them ridiculous. I had looked into flat earth claims and evidence and watched debates and it just doesn't stand up.
I kinda of realized last year that I wasn't familiar with young earth argumentation beyond genesis. So I began watching debates and researching their claims. They kind of made some good points, I think the turning point for me was with the dating of rock layers, namely on the large amount of assumptions that they start with. So I admit that I went on youtube looking for people who were directly refuting that specific young earth point, and they did not do a great job.
Then it all began to fall apart for me over the next few months of researching this topic. Now I have the dubious honor of holding one of the most unpopular views imaginable where people automatically lable you as an idiot, which is fitting because that's what I had done to YEC people before even knowing their argumentation.
Geology girl has some exhaustive explanations of radiometric dating.
Most of the counterapologists on UA-cam are biology oriented so it helps to hear it from a geologist.
Age of Rocks is a new YT channel that does a good job explaining radiometric dating and some of the hijinks YECs. There is a hefty PDF titled Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective that you should look at.
Quite simply, and I mean this without insult, if you researched radiometric dating and came to the conclusion that the YEC crowd are correct you did not do a good job with your research. They are quite obviously incorrect.
I believe the Genesis account. That is mainly why I don't hold tightly to Young Earth. Read Verse 1 and verse 2. And the rest why would you think the earth is young?
@@danhoff4401 I researched for quite some time and I was intellectually set against it, in fact I deliberately looked for geologists to refute it, so I don't know how I could have stacked the deck any more against YEC. And you've sort of proven my point, kind stranger, that believing the earth is young automatically labels you as an idiot. Not saying you did that (I definitely thought of all of them as intellectual goofballs and dismissed them as obviously wrong), but what you have done is automatically assumed that my research was poor. There is a very real stigma against this view.
@@logic8673 Gen 1 and 2 do require a young earth. The creation of animals doesn't line up with the traditionally accepted fossil record, or cosmological evolution, or the fact that an old earth requires death before Adam sins. If there was no true first Adam then Jesus isn't the second Adam. It's far too much to talk about over a youtube comment, but an old earth theologically decimates the bible.
Would you go so far as to extend your desire to reconcile science to other creation stories? If not, why?
Where does Mark 10:16 fit into your outlook?
But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ( ἀπὸ δὲ ἀρχῆς κτίσεως ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ ἐποίησεν αὐτούς·)
What did Yeshua think that meant in late 2nd Temple Judaism? What did Mark think that meant when he rendered these words into koine Greek, still in 2nd Temple days.
I grew up as a default reductionist materialist, interested in "science" as interpreted by modern "Big Science." Through a lot of struggle, I came out of "functional atheism" to faith in an Almighty creator, then later in Yeshua (Jesus), and then later, that the earth may not be as old as reductionist materialist "Big Science" wants everyone to believe.
There is enough water on earth to cover the surface by something like a mile and a half, if all land was flattened and the Marianna Trench was filled in. In my opinion, recent creation cannot be divorced from the possiblity of a universal, world-wide flood. So ignoring the evidence for a world-wide flood will doubltess affect how one thinks of young or old creation. Best wishes on your journey.
Joel, you need to read C.J. Collins: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary about God "taking a man" and placing him in the Garden. If you reside in England and/or English ancestry then you need go back only 600-800 to find you are descended from a King of England. The further back you go the more common ancestors you share. If we go back 6000 years it is not outrageous to claim all are descended from Adam and Eve. What is more is that we have so much DNA in common with each other that it is very hard to claim we have not inherited any DNA from a particular ancestor -- we just can't prove where the DNA came from. We all can trace our Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA to a single people. There is no Y-chromosome crossing over in the gametes. If there was a real Adam, placed in a Garden by God, who went on to sire the Biblical patriarchs, then we have his Y-chromosome.
How do you handle the mounting evidence that Homo sapiens go back further than 200,000 years? Also how do you handle the genetic and archeological evidence that Homo sapiens had offspring with Neanderthals much further back than 6,000 years ago? I’m sure you must have looked into this evidence at some point in your journey and reconciled this data with your view!
I have thought seriously about this, but my conclusions will not fit in a youtube comment.
I think you are missing archeological and anthropological realities that make implausible the idea that we could have emerged from a couple 4-6,000 years ago. To accept this view, you are going to have to grapple with things like the aborigines of Australia and their time lines that go much further than that into the past. At some point you’ll need to define who is and isn’t “human” in order for this timeline to work with evolution. Same issue William Craig has run into. I agree with Pete Enns and others who have pointed out that the whole book of Genesis appears to be a commentary on Israel and the formation of the monarchy. I also agree with Pete when he says Paul of course would have thought Adam was a historical person. He’d have no reason not to. I think many Christians are tied to the idea of original sin and a fallen creation and therefore need the Adam story…which honestly makes for an immoral and theologically complicated idea like original sin. Next thing you know you have Calvinist’s claiming God takes great pleasure seeing even babies in Hell. No. Instead, it seems far more likely the creation story is a statement of a belief that God made and ordered creation, that men are somehow closer than other animals to the image of God and that man’s quest for knowledge ultimately leads to a loss of innocence and a disconnection from the God of life. No need to throw Adam or Eve under the bus and Christ and His work is eternally relevant.
One last consideration that I am not sure you if you’ve looked into yet is what to make of continuous evolution. How does the acknowledgement that evolution is taking place today inform your views of creation?
how much did they know about evolution at time the gospels were written?
once you understand that and not mix it up with the fictional divine, you will understand that you're trying to make bronze age men sound smarter than the body of knowledge amassed since those early times.
evolution is a fact, and we've proven it and been able to formalize our knowledge about it.
you want to say that the book that mentions talking donkeys and snakes etc has the real deal about it. sounds plausible, lol