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prayers were simply repetitions of passages I had learned in school

That's definitely a problem. Prayer is not an incantation of some magical formula. There's no efficacy in reciting the inaccurately termed "Lord's Prayer". We are admonished against vain and repetitious mutterings and babblings. Neither does it say much about what should be an intimate and personal relationship that essentially is nothing more than meaningless, trite, formulaic ritual.

Is it essential to my salvation that I believe that God created the world in 7 days? Or is it enough that I believe that He *did* created it – somehow – and I really don’t care how long it took Him.

An outspoken evolutionist answered your very question in the American Atheist magazine with this reply:

Christianity is - must be! - totally committed to the special creation as described in Genesis, and Christianity must fight with its full might against the theory of evolution. And here is why.
In Romans we read that 'sin entered the world through one man, and through sin - death, and thus death has spread through the whole human race because everyone has sinned.' (5:12)
...the whole justification of Jesus' life and death is predicated on the existence of Adam and the forbidden fruit he and Eve ate. Without the original sin, who needs to be redeemed? Without Adam's fall into a life of constant sin terminated by death, what purpose is there to Christianity? None.
Even a high school student knows enough about evolution to know that nowhere in the evolutionary description of our origins does there appear an Adam or an Eve or an Eden or a forbidden fruit. Evolution means a development from one form to the next to meet the ever-changing challenges from an ever-changing nature. There is no fall from a previous state of sublime perfection.
Without Adam, without the original sin, Jesus Christ is reduced to a man with a mission on a wrong planet!

Can an atheist understand the issues more clearly than most Christians?

The key to a correct understanding of any part of the Bible is to ascertain the intention of the author of the portion or book under discussion. Books in the bible can be poetic, prophetical, letters, biographical, or authentic historical facts. And according to rule of hermeneutics, Scripture is either interpreted literally according to normal natural, historical, grammatical, or allegorical usage. Moreover, nothing is spoken in a vacume and everything is to be taken within the context of how it is intended to be understood.

Chapters 12-50 of Genesis were very clearly written as authentic history, as they describe the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and his 12 sons who were the ancestral heads of the 12 tribes of Israel. The Jewish people, from earliest biblical times to the present day, have always regarded this portion of Genesis as the true record of their nation's history. The Lord Jesus Himself and the Gospel writers said that the Law was given by Moses (Mark 10:3; Luke 24:27; John 1:17), and the uniform tradition of the Jewish scribes and early Christian fathers, and the conclusion of conservative scholars to the present day, is that Genesis was written by Moses. This does not preclude the possibility that Moses had access to patriarchal records, preserved by being written on clay tablets and handed down from father to son via the line of Adam - Seth - Noah - Shem - Abraham - Isaac - Jacob, etc.

We see 11 verses in Genesis (2:4; 5:1; 6:9; 10:1; 11:10; 11:27; 25:12; 25:19; 36:1; 36:9; 37:2) which read, 'These are the generations [Hebrew: toledoth = 'origins' or by extension 'record of the origins'] of...' As these statements all come after the events they describe, and the events recorded all took place before rather than after the death of the individuals so named, they may very well be subscripts or closing signatures, i.e. colophons, rather than superscripts or headings. If this is so, the most likely explanation of them is that Adam, Noah, Shem, and the others each wrote down an account of the events which occurred in his lifetime, and Moses, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, selected and compiled these, along with his own comments, into the book we now know as Genesis.

In Psa 1:1 is an example of Hebrew poetry known as triple parallelism in the nouns and verbs used. If we put the nouns and verbs used into three rows and columns like this:

Walketh counsel ungodly
Standeth way sinners
Sitteth seat scornfull

As well as this overt parallelism, there is also a covert or subtle progression of meaning. In the first column, 'walketh' suggests short-term acquaintance, 'standeth' implies readiness to discuss, and 'sitteth' speaks of long-term involvement. In the second column, 'counsel' betokens general advice, 'way' indicates a chosen course of action, and 'seat' signifies a set condition of mind. In the third column, 'ungodly' describes the negatively wicked, 'sinner' characterizes the positively wicked, and 'scornful' portrays the contemptuously wicked.

Proverbs 27:6, 'Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful' is an example of contrastive paralellism, and in Psalm 46:1, 'God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in time of need.' is an example of completive parallelism.

Nevertheless, while there certainly is repetition in Genesis chapter 1, e.g. 'And God said . . .' occurs 10 times; 'and God saw that it was good/very good' seven times; 'after his/their kind' 10 times; 'And the evening and the morning were the . . . day' six times, however, these repetitions are statements of fact and thus a record of what happened, and possibly for emphasis - to indicate the importance of the words repeated, and not forms of poetry previously mentioned. Hebrew scholars of substance are agreed that Gen 1-11 do not contain information or invocation in any of the forms of Hebrew poetry, in either overt or covert form.

Can the first 11 chapters be considered parables then? When Jesus told a parable He either said it was a parable, or He introduced it with a simile, making it plain to the hearers that it was a parable, as on the many occasions when He said, 'The kingdom of heaven is like . . . .' No such claim whatsoever is made or is such style used by the author of Genesis 1-11.

Except for two prophetic promises of God in the sense that their fulfilment would be seen in the future, none of the first 11 chapters can be perceived as prophetic.

If Adam knew the events of Creation Days 1-6, they must have been revealed to him by God, as Adam was not made until Day 6, and so he could have known them only if God had told him. This view is reinforced by the words, 'These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created . . .' in Genesis 2:4a. The details of Day 7, the rest day, are included before this in Genesis 2:2-3, thereby completing (as we might expect) the record of a full seven-day week, before this subscript or closing signature appears.

The events of Genesis 2:4b-5:1a tells us about Adam, his wife Eve, and their sons, and reads very much like a personal account of what Adam knew, saw, and experienced concerning the Garden of Eden, and the creation of Eve, their rebellion against God, and the deeds of their descendants, albeit written in the third person. This section ends with the words, 'This is the book of the generations of Adam'.

There is no problem concerning Adam's ability to have have written Genesis 1:1-2:4a as the result of his pre-Fall conversation with God, and Genesis 2:4b-5:1 as the record of his own experiences. Adam was created a mature man, endowed with all the DNA, knowledge and skill he needed to perform all the tasks assigned him by God. No cave-man was Adam! He knew enough horticulture 'to dress and to keep' the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:15), and ample intelligence to recognize and name the distinct kinds of animals (Genesis 2:19). Given that he (and Eve) could converse with God without ever having learned an alphabet, is it logicially incongruous to suppose that he was not fully skilled in writing also?

What about alleged inconsistencies - contradictions - between the creation accounts of Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2. Suffice it to say, that upon close and intellectually honest scrutiny, these objections evaporate.

In all frankness, if the normal principles of biblical exegesis (ignoring pressure to make the text conform to the evolutionary prejudices of our age) are applied, it is overwhelmingly obvious that Genesis was meant to be taken in a straightforward, obvious sense as an authentic, literal, historical record of what actually happened.

If Genesis is not to be interpreted literally according to normal natural, or historical usage, or according to grammatical syntactical construct, then it can only be interpreted as allegory without any rules, being purely symobolic metaphor (its meaning open ended and subject to any interpretation). It literally could mean anything. It would be akin to two people in a burning building contemplating the sign that said "In case of fire: PULL". One person could be commenting on the sign's (or the handle's) beauty, and the other could be deriding their oppression of freewill. Except for one thing: in all of Scripture each occurance of allegory is specifically stated as being such: the following is allegory...

Theistic evolution gives a false representation of the nature of God because death and ghastliness are ascribed to the Creator as principles of creation. (Progressive creationism, likewise, allows for millions of years of death and horror before sin.)

Theistic evolution allows the only workspace allotted to God to be that part of nature which science cannot "explain" with the means presently at its disposal. In this way God is reduced to being a "god of the gaps" for those phenomena about which there are doubts. This leads to the view that "God is therefore not absolute, but He Himself has evolved - He himself is evolution".

Theistic evolution undermines the basic way of reading the Bible, as vouched for by Jesus, the prophets and the Apostles, reducing events reported in the Bible to mythical imagery, and an understanding of the message of the Bible as being true in word and meaning is lost. This aspect of theistic evolution as implications of opening the door to the revision, or discarding of subsequent doctrine contained in Scripture.

Evolution denies sin in the biblical sense of missing one's purpose (in relation to God). Since sin is made meaningless, and that is exactly the opposite of what the Holy Spirit does - He declares sin to be sinful, then one has lost the very reason one needs to find God in the first place. Something that, incidently, is not resolved by adding "God" back into the evolutionary scenario by holding to theistic evolution. The whole thing becomes a perversion. Would you knowingly drink water that has a drop of feces in it even though you couldn't actually see the feces in the water?

Theistic evolution does not acknowledge Adam as the first man, nor that he was created directly from "the dust of the ground" by God (Genesis 2:17). Most theistic evolutionists regard the creation account as being merely a mythical tale, albeit with some spiritual significance. However, the sinner Adam and the Saviour Jesus are linked together in the Bible - Romans 5:16-18. Thus any view which mythologizes Adam undermines the biblical basis of Jesus' work of redemption.

Theistic evolution (and progressive creation) disregard the biblically given measures of time in favour of evolutionist time-scales involving billions of years both past and future (for which there are no convincing physical grounds). The ramifications to this are:

1) Not all statements of the Bible are to be taken seriously.

2) Vigilance concerning the second coming of Jesus isn't important.

Theistic evolution ignores all such biblical creation principles and replaces them with evolutionary notions, thereby contradicting and opposing God's omnipotent acts of creation. And finally, theistic evolution breeds nihilism. The source of this is through that of erosion of the purpose proclaimed in Genesis. Man is God's purpose in creation (Genesis 1:27-28), Man is the purpose of God's plan of redemption (Isaiah 53:5), Man is the purpose of the mission of God's Son (1 John 4:9), We are the purpose of God's inheritance (Titus 3:7), Heaven is our destination (1 Peter 1:4).

However, the very thought of purposefulness is anathema to evolutionists. "Evolutionary adaptations never follow a purposeful program, they thus can not be regarded as teleonomical." Thus a belief system such as theistic evolution that marries purposefulness with non-purposefulness is oxymoronic. No, strike that, drop the oxy- prefix and you've got it right.