Nolies, I have a direct question for you —
Even if Genesis is the literal word of God, even if he went so far as to personally come down and dictate it to a scribe, why does it have to be a factual description of our origins?
The story was written down by pre-technical nomadic sheepherders, at least 3,000 years ago. Those people were quite incapable of understanding the origins of the universe as we do now. Isn’t it reasonable to expect that God knew that, and so gave them a story that made sense in the context of their own existence?
I can imagine the conversation:
Moses: So, God, where did we really come from?
God: Well, nearly 14 billion years ago, in this huge whoosh, I created about a googol or so of really, really hot subatomic particles. Then I blew space up like a balloon to give them room to expand. And as they expanded and cooled off, they started joining together to make atoms, then atoms started joining together to make molecules. And after a while, some of the atoms and molecules started clumping together into big balls of gas, and got hot again just from the gravity pushing all the gas together. Inside these big gas balls, atoms starting crashing together to make bigger atoms, and then even bigger atoms. And that gives off lots of heat so these balls glow really bright, too. You’ve seen them … you call them stars; they’re actually really big and really far away. Inside these stars the atoms crashing together made carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and silicon and iron and all the other kinds of atoms that everything is made of. (I’m especially proud of carbon; neat stuff- it can combine in so many different ways you can make almost anything out of it.) And eventually after stars run out of all the smaller atoms, they just blow up and spread atoms all over space.
God: So anyway, after about 9 billion years of this, some of this gas and scattered stardust clumped up and became the sun (yep, it’s just another star, but a lot closer) and the earth and some other planets; stuff just kinda swirled around and fell into place (amazing what gravity can do). Once things settled down, earth got pretty interesting. It was real different than it is now; the hydrogen and carbon and nitrogen and oxygen all connected up into molecules of water and methane and cyanide and more complicated stuff like amino acids. And with all this soupy stuff in the water, all kinds of different molecules formed and broke apart and reformed. And some of the molecules happened to be able to make copies of them selves and some ended up shaped sort of like molds that could make multiple copies of other kind of molecules. And of course, once these molecules existed, they just kept making more of themselves and pretty soon they were everywhere. Some of them ended up inside tiny membrane balls, and pretty soon you have bacteria. No, you’ve never heard of bacteria; they’re way too small to see. Trust me on this.
God: Gotta say, that deoxyribonucleic acid is pretty neat stuff. It can make copies of itself, and it can code all the instructions for how to make a bacteria. And it’s incredibly versatile; a few tweaks here and there and it can hold instructions for making all kinds of things. Pretty soon some of these bacteria started getting ideas. One would get inside another, or several would get together inside a larger membrane, and they started making cells. Then the cells started grouping up and specializing in different jobs, and making organisms. Some cells would be in charge of getting food, some in protecting the organism from dangers, some in making more organisms, and so on. And thanks to that amazing DNA, they can mix and match the codes and makes whole new creatures. Just small changes at a time, of course, but small changes can really add up over a few million years.
God: About a half a billion years ago, things got really interesting. Organisms started getting really complicated. Some of ‘em eventually figured out to survive out of the water. Just by changing the DNA around, plants and animals could exist which would adapt to just abut any environment on the whole planet. Of course, most of them were just experiments. Some other creature came along that was better at living in a certain niche, and the first one ended up dying out. There were some big catastrophes, too. Why just 65 million years ago the earth was just overrun with giant lizards. An asteroid came along and crashed into the earth and killed the whole lot of ‘em. But thanks to good old DNA, the creatures that survived just developed into a whole lot of new kinds, and filled the earth up again. Finally, some of these organisms learned how to think. Several different kinds even learned how to make things and use tools and stuff like that. But you people seemed to be the best at that, so the other ones eventually died out. And so, here you are.
Moses: Yeah, right. Pull the other one.
God: Oh, OK. So I made the whole thing myself in 6 days.
Moses: That makes a lot more sense.
Obviously, I’m being facetious in the details here. But you should get my point. Genesis could not possibly have described our origins in terms of the big bang and evolution, because these concepts were totally beyond the comprehension of the target audience. Is there some legitimate religious objection to the idea that God gave them a story that made sense in the context of their own lives, without it having to be the Absolute Truth?
What “inherent differences” would those be? IANABiologist, but AFAIK, biologists are pretty much agreed that all modern humans are descended from a quite small population (maybe only a few tens of thousands) of humans that survived an evolutionary bottleneck less than a hundred thousand years ago.