This is where we obviously disagree. But as another poster pointed out, it appears (at least to a lot of people) that passages about the "Tree of Life" and the "Tree of Knowledge" are just as obviously metaphoric as the passages as I cited.
Does one's belief in E color the way the look a Scripture, or ones belief in Scripture influence the way they look at the data from the Earth?
Well, I don't see scientific theories as "beliefs" - they are hypotheses strongly supported by physical evidence. There was a time in history where a superliteral interpretation of Scripture did form the basis of inquiry of data, but it was abandoned because consistent, predictive models describing physical evidence could not be formed as a consequence.
The main problem that I (and the scientific community at large) have with "creation science" is the fact that it distorts evidence in blatantly false ways - with repeated statements like "evolution is forbidden by thermodynamics" or "evolution can not add new genetic information" or "there is physical evidence showing that dinosaurs and people lived together", which people who understand science know are simply wrong, and can demonstrate so. I don't fault the people who listen to these things (many of whom have no formal science education); I do fault the people who deliberately mislead others with these kinds of statements.
Theories such as biological evolution, the Big Bang, stellar evolution, plate tectonics, gradual sedimentation, etc. (all separate theories that are often misclassified together under the generic label of "evolution") are used and "believed" because they describe physical evidence with consistent and predictive models, that is all.
Does this color the way I look at Scripture? Only in the same regard that facts I see in everyday life influence the way I look at it (as in I know it's not a good idea to hate my family - this certainly "colors" the way I look at Luke 14:26-27). The fact is, there's just too much evidence supporting the aforementioned theories to just sweep under the rug; this would hardly be the honest behavior God would want, IMHO. I do believe the central theme to Christ's message was not to get hung up on the specifics of what, where, when and how in Scripture, but to take to heart the precepts behind it - as in the case where He and the apostles were gathering grain on the Sabbath; this angered the Pharisees, who adhered to the literal meaning of Scripture without thinking of what the purpose of the Sabbath was. Whether certain specific passages are literal or metaphorical is not the point - the point is how they speak to one's heart, mind and soul.
My personal belief in the meaning of the Creation account and the fall of man? I believe that the eating from the Tree of Knowledge symbolizes that once people became intelligent and chose to seek knowledge, we became aware of our mortality, and our newly found fear separated us from God - this was the "fall from grace" of our own making. It may have been specifically through one man named Adam that this originally happened, I don't really know. (Though if the story were exactly literal, wouldn't Jesus have said one man and one woman?) A reading of Genesis 4 does seem to imply there were other people around at the time, as when in verse 14 Cain worries that "whoever finds me will kill me". Anyway that's enough - this is only my personal take on the account anyway; I'm sure you've heard similar ideas before.
I have thought for some time that there must have been a specific time in history when people realized that sex causes babies. Some people speculate that this realization did not occur until people started domesticating animals.
Excellent post, Quark2005.
As for the extract I've quoted above, we've only to look at the case of the Church's persecution of Galilleo--in terms virtually identical to some of the arguments of some Creationists. It is worthy pointing out (again) how there was a time when to assert that the earth orbited the sun was held to be a vile heresy, punishible by death, by a Church which feared that anything other than an absolute and literal interpretation of scripture would result in universal anarchy.
The Church was wrong then about the science, and wrong about the consequences of following the science. Mercifully, most Churches today don't have such spurious difficulties with science--though it is clear that a minority of fndamenatlists, seeking political influence using good PR but lousy junk-science, do have a specific--and potentially dangerous--agenda
Probably not; as His listeners were fully aware of the references He was making.