> I've always felt that the creation story was just that, a story told by one storyteller to another and eventually it was written down and passed to following generations who may have added to it, may have subtracted from it, until it came to a point in time where it was widely circulated in printed form. I imagine at this point one copy was used as the basis for the first few "definitive" copies of the creation story. From then, it was meticulously copied by hand and eventually it was accepted as the one, true version.
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> So, back to the question -- no, I think the six days were not six, normal twenty-four hour days. Most likely, this was the oral storytellers' way of trying to comprehend what really happened. They weren't around 16-odd billion years ago, so they had to make something up that made sense to them. If God created the Earth (and Mars and Alpha Centauri A, B, and C, and the Andromeda Galaxy and all those other galaxies way off in the Hubble Deep Field), he probably set everything in motion in the split second the universe was created.

This is pretty much the way I see it too. I believe in God but I don't believe in the literal truth of the Bible. If parts of it can be proven to be historically accurate, fine. The rest of it, I take on its own merits: some bits as valuable spiritual insight, some bits as good advice, some bits as myth, some bits as wonderful poetic writing, some bits of no interest to me whatsoever. If anybody wants me to more clearly define my belief in God, or worse still demands to know WHICH PARTICULAR God and what he wants us to do, you'll have to wait until I sort that out myself. But there definitely is one, probably, and even if there isn't I plan on behaving as if there was, because that's what I think is the right way to behave.

Brunnen-"this would be the 'incoherent' school of religious belief"G