There are no answers in Genesis

[Belacqua]

if it's claiming to be a historical record, which I believe is most probable for the Eden story, then that's how I think it needs to be judged.

Yeah, I don't think we're going to agree on this.

I see no reason to believe the Eden story was ever intended as journalism or history. 

Affective, suggestive, spiritual literature, including scripture, just isn't meant to be read as a straight accounting of facts. That would be like reading Swann's Way as a factual listing of events. It would be like trying to make oneself autistic. Not to read it as spiritual just seems bizarre to me. 

I think that modern ways of reading have damaged our abilities. Somehow people think that every book should be read as if it were a physics textbook, and books which can't be read this way are failures. It narrows down the possibilities of human experience.