Hi Chuck,
I admire your willingness to take the scientific approach on board, but there really is no way that this is going to fly. Genesis is completely incompatible with science, from word one. I mean, let's take a look;
1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Huh? Waters? What waters? At the beginning of the universe? The early universe had no waters because the oxygen had not formed. Maybe it's talking about the early Earth. But that doesn't work either, because the very early Earth was too hot for standing water. This passage is in direct contravention of what we know to be true. In short, it's wrong. And this is just the first example. There are many more. Genesis goes on to be wrong about almost everything it describes.
So what are you going to do when you come across passages like this that are erroneous? The scientific approach would be to regard them as simply wrong (in fact a scientist would not bother consulting Genesis in the first place to be honest). Are you willing to go that far? Are you willing to concede that much of Genesis is wrong? Or are you going to stubbornly hold on to the text as Holy Writ and throw out the science instead? I can assure you, you can't have both.
As reasonable people, we have an innate instinct for compromise. That's what you seem to be trying to achieve here, a compromise between religion and science. That's admirable, in principle, and I applaud your instincts. The trouble is that not all compromises are reasonable. Sometimes, one side of an argument has it right and the other side is just wrong. That's the case here; Genesis is full of errors and trying to shoehorn it into a scientific framework is going to be impossible without compromising one or both.
Basically i'm asking if some of the evolutionists here were to undertake a project of going about to try to build a Creation Model according to the book of Genesis how would you go about doing it?
I'm asking if you were to try to do it, how would you? Where would you start?
I would start by discarding the Book of Genesis and starting from the evidence instead. That is how science works, not by studying scripture, but by following the evidence. If you do it your way, you won't be engaged in science. "Science" that takes a religious text as its starting point is not science, period.
Sorry. I know this is not what you wanted to hear, but I think that to respond to your request in the way you ask for would be to do you a disservice. Genesis has no place in science and science has no place in the Bible. To try and kid you that things are otherwise would be deeply patronising.
Mutate and Survive
™ Version 4.2
