Thank you for the civil response. We will continue to disagree.
I haven’t softened my position by including “in places”. That is what I have always felt. However, one cannot convey an entire outlook in a few post on this board. It is not, as I understand it, peer reviewed.
To summarize, I beleive that the Bible is allegorical in places, and the places in which it is so becomes clearer as we grow in intellectual capacity, a capacity that God gave us. I believe that the earth is very old, and I believe that evolution is the path that God used to get is here. Furthermore, it took a lot more than 5000 years to do so.
Finally I am a Christian of great faith. I believe that literalists betray a weak faith.
You say you can pick holes—go ahead. Science and Christianity support my position.
Thanks again.
“I believe that literalists betray a weak faith”
having seen it from both sides, I know that’s not true. Accepting the world’s way is the easy thing to do. I used to be pretty adamant like you, but came to realize my belief wasn’t based on science - I had done no research into the creation , or the impossibility of evolution, but just assumed that the “consensus science” was right. The fact is, it’s blatantly wrong, but no one ever deals with it. For example the Big Bang. Were it true, we should be able to see much further in one particular direction in the fixed sky, that being the location of the “event”. But the furthest galaxies (or rather fuzzy redshifted blobs we presume to be galaxies!) seen are evenly distributed across the sky. This directly contradicts the big bang theory, but most people are completely unaware of it, because it was never reported like that in any major publication, so most people think there was a “big bang” some place billions of years ago, like it’s a fact, when it is completely impossible, scientifically.
all of the wrong science is non-observational, theory-on-top-of-theory. all of the observational science is totally true.