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If God had told Moses to write down a description of the Big Bang Theory, quantum mechanics and modern astrophysics, the people would have had a good laugh and gone back to worshiping golden statues of cows.

One example that I've used is "imagine if God sat a plasma TV in front of Moses and tuned into the Discovery channel for a video on His Creation". God then told Moses to write down what he saw, and what came out was "In the beginning, God created the heaven and earth".... Sure, it was perfectly inspired by God. But the words from Moses' pen communicate nothing like perfect reality.

Humans never do anything perfectly. There are recent movements among the fundimentalist denominations to believe the Bible "literaly". But the fact is that humans transcribed it onto paper, and retranslated it by hand for centuries. I believe the Bible to be the perfectly inspired word of God. But I don't believe that the human caretakers over the centuries were perfect, or perfectly inspired themselves.

Comparing the first sections of the Bible to the Dead Sea Scrolls that date to just about Jesus' time, demonstrates that there were lots of changes in the verses. Yes, they're pretty close. But they are not exact.

The Old Testament that we read, even in Hebrew, is not the same Old Testament that Jesus studied.

Flame away, lurkers.

I also believe the Bible is the Truth, the inspired word of God. In my denomination that makes me one of those goldarned fundamentalists. It's just that sometimes it can be real hard to understand what God is trying to tell us, which, I suppose, is why we have so many denominations.

To me, Genesis is about the origins of the Universe and the Earth, but has little to say about the origin of species, other than that God was involved in their creation. God gave us the big picture and left it to us to figure out the details.

I also don't believe that Genesis fixes the age of the Earth. That is an inference some have drawn, the actual calculation having been done by one Bishop Ussher, an Anglican. Interestingly, William Jennings Bryan was an old Earth creationist, not a young Earth guy. You should read sometime the actual transcript of the cross-examination - it's very different from the Inherit the Wind fiction. Actually, the cross-examinaiton was one of Clarence Darrow's poorer efforts, with Bryan often getting the upper hand. And no, he never broke down on the stand; he was rather amused by the whole thing.

Full disclosure: I think Darwin got it wrong concluding random genetic mutation leading to natural selection from a "war of the survival of the fittest" is the agent of change within species or leading to new species. I think there is a different change agent we have not yet discovered.