Since the time of Moses, folks had a pretty clear understanding of the exact meaning of Genesis.
It is only since Darwin wrote "Origin of the Species" that the book of Genesis has been considered open for interpretation.
Why, in the course of several thousand years, was no priest bright enough to figure out that Genesis was not written to be read literally?
How did we mere mortals become so intelligent over the last 100 years?
cause if the Bible is the absolute literal word of god than the young earth creationists are right and if they are right our understanding of most any science is complete and total horse chit and voodoo.....if the creation story is exactly as written and not open for interpretation all sciences start falling apart at some point......
if the earth is only thousands instead of billions of years old its not the smartest thing in the world to let a doc preform chemotherapy on you or those you love cause it means we have no real understanding on how to measure radioactive decay which is a huge part of that area of medicine....
There are a number of ideas (theories if you want to call them that) of how what we can observe scientifically meshes with a literal reading of the Genesis account of creation. However, there are a lot of people who had rather say that "science" is "wrong" or the Genesis account is wrong rather than observing how they aren't necessarily in conflict.
My personal belief is that we as a human race don't know enough to clearly see that there is no conflict between the science and the Genesis account. Throw in some assumptions that people make about the Genesis account, and conflict is imagined where none exists.
Edit to add that I'm excluding macro evolution from science in my above discussion. Obviously some (many) people think that macro evolution is fact and part of the body of scientific knowledge. Many others, myself included, are very skeptical about the theory of macro evolution, to the point of considering it not proven (i.e., not established scientific fact like the science we can replicate in the lab or clearly see by other observation).
