I like how Genesis also notes that He made the stars also....it was almost as an afterthought the author included this fact of creation.
I teach a class on Sunday mornings and it really amazes me the influence of culture on the creation account. Many folks just can’t see to come to grips that God is capable of creating the entire universe in just a few spoken words.
I ask them if He can’t do creation in six days, or six minutes or whatever measure of time you want, then how can He raise someone from the dead?
Why is the creation account so hard to believe for many Christians?
Depends on the interpetation ~ God can do anything. Most hard-core interpretations of Genesis ask us to LIMIT GOD.
Because faith cometh by hearing.
Actually, that is not true. Not true, that is, in the sequence of events of Creation, nor the implication of the stars being an “afterthought.” The true story of the stars is actually much more elegant, much more faith-inspiring. But only if you understand the physics and biology required.
The miracle of Creation (as described in Genesis) is not so much that it is accurate with respect to the nuclear physics of the Big Bang, stellar evolution, planetary formation and continental drift/plate tectonics, but that every step of every “scientific theory” that we now know IS exactly described already in Genesis. Before writing, before anything resembling arithmetic (much less computers, mathematics, powers-of-ten, logarithms or even the number zero) were invented.
When you state “made the stars” you're actually describing how the stars (and moon) were “set in the heavens” to “rule the sky”. These had already been created “in the beginning” but were revealed (to someone on earth) only AFTER the plants grew enough to produce enough oxygen to clear the skies and allow them to be seen. Before that period, before the atmosphere changed, the stars and moon were hidden: just like Venus and Saturn's atmospheres are opaque.
Re-read Genesis: Notice now that the "waters below" were gathered into "one ocean"? (A true scientifically accurate statement in Genesis, since there was only one continent before they broke up as plate tectonics moved them around)? However, when Genesis was finally written down from its oral tradition, did not the writers KNOW absolutely that there were many seas and many lands? Would that conflict not prevent a "faith" in the accuracy of the Story from ever being accepted in the first place?
Plants - as we now know - were created first, then life in the sea, then "birds" (dinosaurs - as we just now figured out these past 20 years!), and only afterwards were land animals formed, with domesticated mammals last. Again, as we just now know.
Snakes, as you may not know, were a very, very recent development, not being formed (evolved as some call it) until after the continents and islands broke up less than 30 million years ago.
If you wish, we can also go into the nuclear physics Genesis describes just as accurately.