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There are lots of places in the Bible where people misinterpreted what was said in the scriptures. In order to be a Christian, you don't need to disbelieve evolution. You only need to believe that Christ is God, that He died on the cross for our sins, and that He rose again.

Bravo!

As Darrow pointed out in the Scopes trial, our day is 24 hours long, but we have no way of knowing how long God's day is. I continue in that vein by saying that, if we automatically presume that His day is as long as ours, we risk thinking that He is like us and, by doing so, we drag Him down to our level. God is not like us, and we have no business thinking that anything He does is analagous to anything we do.

And, by telling us that the Earth is only a couple of thousand of (our) years old, while at the same time allowing us to use our technology to show that the Earth is, in fact, billions of years old, seems to me to imply that God is a practical joker. And I cannot believe for an instant that our fundamentalist colleagues would ever dream of implying that God is a practical joker.

On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me one bit.

In fact, anyone who is a creationist and doesn't think God is a practical joker is ignoring the duck-billed platypus. 8>)

Thus a literal reading of the Bible, on which "creation science" implicitly insists, misses the point of the Bible itself, which seems uninterested in literal interpretation. Like poetry and certain kinds of prose, which sometimes speak in metaphors and symbols, the Bible as a whole does not intend these stories to be taken literally. Literalism is not only misleading but is also a disservice to the cause of the Bible itself. It forces the Bible to compete as science, and in such a competition it cannot win. In a scientific age such as ours the Bible will never be accepted as science by educated people. What is more, attempting to secure acceptance for it as science is hardly worthwhile, for this would divert attention away from the Bible's religious message to details which from a religious point of view are trivial. The religious message is precisely the realm in which science cannot compete, and those devoted to the cause of the Bible would do far better service to their cause by stressing its unique religious message. To the religious person it makes little difference whether the world was created in six days or several billion years.

-- Jeffrey H. Tigay, Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures in the Department of Oriental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania