Blacknad, you wrote:

"Six day creation was not always such a strong belief in the church. It is partly a reaction to losing ground to science generally. A kind of intellectual siege mentality by the church."

This is very much in agreement with what I wrote a few weeks ago:

"As people feel threatened they often retreat into a more extreme version of their beliefs rather than adjust those beliefs to fit the facts as demonstrated."

It seems to me any argument that the six days are not to be taken literally ignores the fact that this is almost certainly what the originators of the myth intended. God was so powerful he could make the whole universe in just six days, literally from dawn to dusk.

I certainly don't wish to annoy you Blacky but I have a gripe with people who use arguments to prove to their own satisfaction there is some sort of God then, with no evidence whatsoever, make the completely unjustified leap to saying this God is the one represented in the Old Testament. Even Revlgking, who claims to have a liberal view of who or what God is, makes this leap of faith. His beliefs are totally grounded in Judeo-Christian cosmology. The God of the Old Testament is a really nasty old [censored], completely inappropriate for anyone to worship these days. I have no argument with the God of the New Testament but this God is totally different to that of the OT, although he still seems to want to punish harshly anyone who doesn't follow him.

A mass of evidence shows us the OT is simply a series of writings collected around 600 BC to justify the Jerusalem temple's right to collect donations from surrounding groups. There is not the slightest bit of evidence that anything before this time is other than myth. This includes stories about Adam and Eve, Noah, the tower of Babel, Abraham, Moses and even King Solomon. It's possible the legends around David developed from a real person, but a person who was little more than a hill country bandit at the time the Philistines were Egyptian mercenaries.