I have nothing to back this up so take it for what it is worth.
If you read the bible from cover to cover, you read of creation and destruction, over and over. Usually God leaves a remnant to move his plan forward. Even the creation we live in now is destined for destruction.
When you look at the geologic history of this planet, we see creation and destruction. Entire kingdoms of species disappear and are replaced with new. The actions we read about in the Bible are very similar to the actions we see recorded in the Earth.
I have complete faith that the truth put forward in the Bible is literally true but we infer so much that we cannot understand how the truth in the Bible reconciles with the truth seen in fossils and geology.
When we have the opportunity to see the universe from the perspective of God, we will see that he has given us the truth in the Bible.
I have faith that we are descended from Adam. I am not threatened by the fact that there appears to be creatures that looked similar to me before Adam and there are similarities in the structures of animals and my structure, we are all God's creation.
I am a strange breed that believes in the literal truth of Genesis and in the study of evolution without seeing a contradiction.
I usually don't discuss this as it totally freaked out my preacher and nonbelievers dismiss it out of hand.
“I am a strange breed that believes in the literal truth of Genesis and in the study of evolution without seeing a contradiction.”
Not sure what you mean.
I believe in Genesis, basically and in evolution. I believe evolution is the method God chose to create one species from another.
The Bible says the world was created in seven days. How long was a day back then? Is God’s day the same as our day? Can a finite mind really understand God and his methods? Didn’t God create the laws of physics and biology through which evolution and the Big Bang operated? Doesn’t that mean, essentially, the same things as Genesis?
When Genesis says that God created man out of the dust of the earth, does it mean literally “dirt” or a lower animal? Does it mean that God created man out of basic chemicals like methane, etc, through the evoltuonary process? Who exactly WAS Adam anyway? Was he an individual or a population? If God created man from a lower animal, at what point in the evolutionary cycle did man become man and not some lower hominid? Didn’t that happen at the point God gave him an immortal soul? Does that mean that lower animals are soul-less or does that mean that the souls of men and lower creatures are in some way different as ours are a mirror of God (made in His image and likeness)?
What about the passage in the Bible about the Sons of God and the daughters of men and there were giants in those days? What does that mean???
The Bible is full of statements that generate questions. Different people read these statements and come up with different answers. The reason the Bible was not translated into the vernacular until the Reformation was because the Medieval Church was aware of this and didn’t want people reading it and asking their own questions and coming up with answers which might be unorthodox and question the authority of the Medieval Church.
I think, as a Christian, the most important part of the Bible is the message that God created man in his image, that man sinned, that he has an immortal soul, that he was place on earth to choose between God and salvation, betweeen the Devil and Christ, that God sent his only Son to pay the price for our sins and save us, if we were willing to accept that salvation, and that Christ will come again at the Last Judgement to raise the dead and either condemn or save us, based on our acceptance of Him and His teachings, and that those who are saved willl live on in His presence.
I believe you can’t be a Christian unless you believe in the immortal soul, in the sacrifice and salvation that came from Christ’s death and suffering, that He was the Son of God, that He rose from the Dead and that Satan exists as a living entity and is the enemy of God, us and the truth.
Everything else is just secondary.