Disproving Odin - An Experiment in arguing with a theist with Theist logic

[SteveII]

Before you go on about Gen 1-3, there are way way way more people that ever lived that believe Gen 1-3 was allegorical in nature than believed it to be literal.

That's irrelevant.  What matters is whether the author of Genesis intended it to be taken literally.  It's consistent with both the time period and the genre that he did.  Against that are incredibly weak textual arguments that it was intended as allegory.  The fact that some body of people treat it as allegory is more an artifact of people realizing that holding to a literal interpretation of Genesis puts them in the position of defending things like the flood, which they realize they can't reasonably defend.  It's a tactical retreat, unrelated to the facts of history which are that originally, it was accepted as literal.  You're always going on about how the authors of the gospels "would have known eye witnesses," implying that their proximity to the events is a testament to their historical validity, yet when it comes to Genesis, you implicitly argue against that standard; you seem to have a double standard here.

The first three chapters of Genesis are linguistically different from the rest of Genesis both in style and come from a different time in history (use of older language). So, who was the author? Certainly not the same as the rest of the book.

The context was that there were other creation accounts from other civilization (including the recent 400 years the Jews spent in Egypt) and it is likely that the Jews were passing this one down long before Genesis was written to teach their children the distinctions from other religions: that the world is a created entity (no endowed with its own spirituality) and done so by the monotheistic God they worshiped. The actual Hebrew is poetic and highly structured--which is easier to recite and teach from generation to generation (oral tradition) and clearly not meant to be a science text (since very few science text are written in poetic form).

So, was it 6 days, 6 periods, 6 billion years? Who knows. As long as you believe that God is responsible for the creation of the cosmos and humans are in the image of God, there are a variety of ways you can assemble a systematic theology and still be internally consistent.