Honestly a reading of the creation story in the Bible really isn’t that far off from reality other than the days part. There was a void. God spoke into it and things were created. (Big Bang) Night and day first (stars), then land and sea (Earth), then plants, then fish, then creatures, then man. That’s the order that archeologists say it happened and that’s what Moses wrote down 3500ish years ago. There was also a worldwide flood in 9000 BC that killed almost all humans on the Earth at the time and probably destroyed an ancient and fairly advanced civilization. That flood was probably caused by meteorites. (Noah and Soddom and Gamorah).
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Well, you wrote it, so it must be true. I do not need to look any further into this. All hail, Nick!!
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Look up the end of the Younger Dryas ice age. Also the flood is a part of many different cultures mythology. Do you think that is just a coincidence?
More like a conspiracy.
A “Great Flood” is a great story to scare people into their giving one person (or a small group) power and control over them. THAT is a part of many cultures’ factual history. NOT a coincidence.
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I was taught that Genesis explained “why” while science explained “how.”
I do not think Genesis can be read as being what we would call historical. It is also not scientific, in the sense that it is most concerned with adherence to observer-independent facts.
On the other had, I’ve become much more pragmatic in the way that I see scientific explanations. This doesn’t mean I think scientific knowledge is simply “true” in so far as it is useful in some way. There is scientific understanding that is more or less true in some absolute sense. But practically, most people’s ideas of how something works is really wrong in that same absolute sense. Even a trained scientist is going to get a lot of things wrong because those truths aren’t practically needed for the purpose at hand. For example, how many people get space-time right when they think about the big bang? I’d guess, practically none of them.
One thing the Christian reading of Genesis gets very right compared to the Greco-Roman view, and practically every other non-Western view too, as far as I know: it sees the universe as something fundamentally changing, as opposed to something cyclical that has existed forever. I know there is some cosmological argument of a universe of cyclical big bangs. But even if that is true, we see our own time here as fundamentally changing, rather than a stasis that has enthralled us.
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Why does Night and Day imply stars? If you just had a sun there’s no day/night cycle, that requires being on a rotating object.
There is also the time before death, and the only-2-people. As a matter of science these seem at least as important as the days.
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If you just avoid the inconvenient parts, change meanings of words and allow me to interject my own bias to further my agenda then the creation story in the Bible is spot on with reality.
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Religions have many stories in common.
Either it’s because the stories are universal or it’s because every religion is true.
I tend to think it’s the former. Every ancient civilization had a problem with floods and plagues. And could easily imagine what it would be like if it just grew and grew.
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Since every early civilization was on a major river, it’s not surprising that flood myths developed.
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Oh my, i missed that we were now using Plato’s fiction as evidence of the flood.
I personally believe that the Flood exists among cultures because floods happen. I might expound on my thinking later, simply do not have the time this moment. However, it’s not weird for a flood to harm a significant number of people, as we’d be aware as actuaries (at least the P&C ones specifically.)
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Exactly.
As a physics student at a Christian college I never felt the Big Bang negated Genesis. It made me so mad when I found out one of the local churches had practically black balled my favorite professor bc of a lecture he did on the Big Bang. 
And that was before I understood Genesis as poetry.
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I guess these types of "facts’ are exactly why this thread was created.
Edited to be nicer.
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Imagine, for the moment, that something analogous to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 (where the Mississippi River grew to 80 miles wide, at its widest) happened in one of the cradles of civilization in late prehistoric times.
That would have spawned many flood stories among cultures descended from that cradle.
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I am hoping to eliminate negativity such as this regardless of my personal beliefs. I’m trying to remain fairly neutral. But I’m no mod, not my choice.
It is your thread, i will play nice.
Edited my post.
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Frankly I feel more harmed by the RMS Flood model, amirite?
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So the last ice age ending in just a few decades didn’t cause any flooding. That’s great. We can now ignore global warming because melting ice doesn’t matter.
The origin of the Grand Canyon has long been ascribed to long and slow erosion. An interesting alternate theory is based on a large ice age impoundment breaking free as the glaciers melted. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a combination.