Who do you believe, the "science" or the Bible?
Which one has yielded useful information? I can't use anything from the Bible, but we're all using science right now. That's the evidence that allows us to decide which to rely on - which one generates knowledge that can be used to make life longer, healthier, safer, more functional, less laborious, etc..
the days of creation were exactly 24 hours. Because if you look more closely, you will see that it is written at the end of each day of creation: "And it was evening and it was morning; the ? day". The logical conclusion of this is that the days of creation were indeed 24 hours each. But there is a reason for all this, because of course God, if he wanted to, could have created the world in less than 1 second. But he had it done that way, as a sign of time and especially as a sign of the Sabbath.
I agree that the six days of creation and the one day of rest were intended to mean 24 hour period, and I have what I think is an interesting hypothesis to account for the odd appearance of a story about an omnipotent god needing six days to work, and then a day of rest.
Once, before the advent of organized, centralized religion, I presume that it was considered sinful for any able-bodied person capable of working to not work simply because he wanted a day off. The flocks needed attention every day. If it was planting or harvesting season, there were no days when planting or harvesting didn't occur until the job was done.
Fast forward to the advent of organized religion with a priesthood and centralized gathering places for religious purposes. The priesthood needs the people to come to it and the temple, which requires that people put down their plowshares, travel to the synagogue for services, and to bring tithes to support the priests.
This round trip and meeting would likely take most of a day for many of the people served by any given synagogue, and require that the farmer, smith, or shepherd take a day off work to travel to the priests - once considered sinful sloth. A new ethic was born. You will take one day away from your labors each week In fact, it was commanded under penalty of stoning, which commandment made the top ten list. The sin then became working on this day. And God's day of rest serves as the role model, and why it is sinful to not also take a day off each week.
Notice also the choice of the week, an artificial construct with no astronomical correlate like the day, month, or year, which are inspired by celestial motions and cycles. How often shall these people be instructed to take a day off and bring tithes to the priests? A month was too long, and a day too short, so, the week was invented - the work week to be precise.
Now the story make sense. Now we have a plausible reason for there being six days of labor for this god followed by one of rest.
I've found it helpful over the years to ask why these stories have such strange elements in them, such as why a god needed a day of rest. Askyourself why the flood story appears in the Bible. Here we have a story of a morally and intellectually incompetent god depicted as fallible, capricious, cruel, unfair, and not too smart creator for using the same breeding stock to repair its engineering mistake with humanity?. Why would such a story be preserved? What purpose does it fulfill?
I think it begins with finding sea shells and marine fossils on mountaintops. Explain that if you're an ancient.
Today, we understand that these mountain tops were former sea floors uplifted by plate tectonics to form mountains. But in ancient times, that was unthinkable. To them, the seas rose to cover all the land.
For whatever his reason, God must have drowned the earth. Being a good god, it must have been deserved. These must have been wicked people indeed. And there's your flood story, and why this flood is global when all other floods witnessed by man were local and didn't cover the highest peaks.
Again, now the inclusion of such a story makes sense.
In the religion I follow, Swedenborgianism, Genesis is intended to be mythological rather than a literal account of actual historical events.
I think that the stories were once understood to be history, but being guesses, were later shown to be wrong. Somebody originally knew that they were just making up stories, but after they had been told and retold generation after generation around the fire, they were not told or understood as myths, but as history.
It's only now that we know that these stories are wrong, but still beloved by many, that they are charitably presented as if they were always intended to be metaphors or allegories rather than just wrong.
Likewise with every other culture with a creation story. There is no reason to think, for example, that the Vikings didn't literally believe that, "Odin, Vili, and Ve killed the giant Ymir. The sons of Bor then ... made the world from him. From his blood they made the sea and the lakes; from his flesh the earth; from his hair the trees; and from his bones the mountains. They made rocks and pebbles from his teeth and jaws and those bones that were broken." They didn't tell these stories and end them with, "This never really happened. It's just a myth. We don't know what happened, so let's tell these stories until we do."
