I do not believe it was my "choice"; notice that chuckles said after he was born-again (i.e. regenerated) he believed.
The truth revealed in Scripture is that we are born spiritually dead, really dead stinking corpses Rom 3:23, Eph 2:1b, and, as such, can only come to faith if God justifies us while we were yet ungodly/dead Rom 5:10a through the blood of His Incarnate Son Jesus; quickens us Eph 2:1a; implants faith Eph 2:8 resulting in repentance of sin & faith in His righteousness being imputed to us 2 Cor 5:21; sanctifies us so that we can say with Paul Gal 2:20 “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.” ; and ultimately glorifies us with the end that we shall see Jesus by sight,& be found in character in his likeness. All to the glory of the Triune God
All of which is the result of God of His free will choosing us resulting in our regeneration/rebirth by the power of the Holy Spirit; we are reborn/regenerated not by the will of man but by the will of God. John 1:13
That was your choice. Nothing in Scripture demands that you take every word literally.
I disagree since I hold by hypothesis that that the Scripture is the true word (Word) of God. You apparently holding to a mix of truth & error/myth/??.
You also run the risk that your faith could be totally shattered with the revelation of an undeniable scientific discovery which God blesses us with from time to time.
A meaningless self-contradictory statement. But without restating it to make sense, I will agree with you as to my faith, the keyword being my. Saving faith is not whatever faith we are born with it is the faith we are reborn with, a super natural faith, Eph 2:8-9.
Personally, I see literalists as knowing all the words but never quite understanding the message.
I claim that the primary message of Scripture is summarized quite well by the above comment to your That was your choice
As to Creation, I have no desire to tell God how He should have done it. I'm simply content to know that He did... how He did it is immaterial as far as my faith is concerned.
By stating such verses from Scripture as Let there be light, ..., and the evening & the morning were the fourth day we literalists are not telling God how he should have done it but God is telling man as much as he would have us know. On the other hand, it is clear from your references to science that you are quite willing to let us literalists know that he did not do it in 7 days or 10,000 years ago or whatever conclusions can/should be drawn from Scripture.
Your pejorative use of literalists should stop short of us claiming God has wings because he spreads his wings over us in love; we do not claim God is a chicken or some such bird. However please charge us with such things as holding to virgin birth, truly God & truly man, raised bodily from the literally dead, ascending in body literally to heaven, literally being the sole mediator between God & man, and literally returning to judge the quick & the dead. All of which have already been called foolish by, denied by, laughed at by scientists; not only those of this age but from the time the first bite was removed from the apple.
But praise be to God!!: even those, who today, this minute, call all this foolish can yet be changed even in the twinkling of an eye because they may have been chosen from before the foundation of the world & yet not have reached the time when God will quicken.
For salvation is of the Lord & none other.
I guess. If you believe God only reveales Himself through the pages of the book of Genesis and never through the discovery of His creation that is known as "science."
500 years ago, would you would have denied that the Earth rotated around the Sun because someone did a literal interpretation of Scripture that said the opposite? When people were burning witcfhes for causing the plague, would you have also burned the guy who blamed infected flees?
If some distant ancestor had some slightly different DNA code were not a human, does that make me not human and a child of God? Trust me, I am not insulted if you were to tell me I came from a monkey. That, if a fact, has nothing to do with me or who I am.
His greatest gift (and challenge) to us is our ability to think and by doing so, we have done both great good and great evil. He allows us to do either... it's up to each of us to choose. But those who turn their brain off and decide there is nothing worth searching for because it was all written in Bronze Age texts or some science text book, I think are denying His gift --- the ability to think.
The Bible contains great wisdom. But it is not the end of Revelation... it's only the beginning. Science today is also only a beginning --- just a peek at what really is. Neither is the entire story.
I agree that people who use science to deny God are arrogant fools. But they are no more foolish than those who would use God to deny science. IMHO, science is simply the physical evidence of God. To deny one is too deny the other.