For a mighty long time, the book of Genesis was understood to be history, not allegory or anything else. Josephus, the respected Jewish historian, also recognized the straightforward reading of Genesis. One in a while, some owlhoot would try to change the literal days of Genesis into something else In the days of the Reformers, some folks tried to make the days much quicker, but most accepted literal creation days.
Later, professing Christians compromised on the meaning of the days of Genesis in order to accommodate atheistic interpretations of "science", and commenced to shoving millions of years into the text. They also began rejecting creation in favor of evolutionism, and the faith of many was shipwrecked. I suspicion that religious folks didn't want to look stupid to the burgeoning secular science promoters, and were fearful of ridicule. Did they, and do people today, want to please men, or God?
There are various attempts to marry up Genesis and atheistic science, but all of them require extreme eisegesis. They also elevate man-made science philosophies into the magisterial position above the written Word of God.
Later, professing Christians compromised on the meaning of the days of Genesis in order to accommodate atheistic interpretations of "science", and commenced to shoving millions of years into the text. They also began rejecting creation in favor of evolutionism, and the faith of many was shipwrecked. I suspicion that religious folks didn't want to look stupid to the burgeoning secular science promoters, and were fearful of ridicule. Did they, and do people today, want to please men, or God?
There are various attempts to marry up Genesis and atheistic science, but all of them require extreme eisegesis. They also elevate man-made science philosophies into the magisterial position above the written Word of God.
To finish reading, click on "Genesis Doesn't Fit with Deep Time".A recent Pew Research Center poll showed the number of Americans who professed to be Christian declined by 7.8% between 2007 and 2014, while the number professing other faiths or identifying as unaffiliated increased by 7.9%.1 Only 50% of the younger millennials (born 1990–1996) believe in God with absolute certainty, and only 52% believe that Scripture is the Word of God. These are alarming figures that reflect our postmodernist culture and our views of who God is and what He has done. A telling indicator would be a millennial’s answer to the question “Did God really create the world in six days?”The Christian community holds varying views on the first chapter of Genesis. Some simply believe the biblical six-day creation narrative as it stands, while increasing numbers of people attempt to fit creation into the hypotheses of modern secular science or other views consistent with a deep-time paradigm of a universe billions of years old.