Look, underneath the shaman's robes and the funny headdress, I'm about as Christian as they come.
Still, I can walk my own farm and see the effect that glaciers had. If you tell me the Earth is 4 billion or 14 billion years old, I'll listen. A lot of what God does takes time.
There is a hole in the ground at my salt lick. I've been pouring in bags of rock salt every year for the deer. The deer have created quite a crater, carrying of bits of soil in their gut. I was bored one day and tried to calculate how long it would take them to dig a cellar and how much salt it would take. My head started to hurt.
On the other hand, there's a cave on the shores of Lake Victoria-- a monstrous thing. It has no water running into it, so they know it wasn't formed like normal karst. They figure it was the elephants, for God-knows-how-long going to a huge salt lick. Given how fast it takes, those elephants have been working on it probably longer than there have been elephants.
Do I believe the Bible? Yes, and in the case of Genesis, I believe at some time primordial a bunch of sheep herders got the lowdown from on High in the terms they understood and did their best to remember it. I believe that Moses got the straight dope from God in the best terms he could understand. I believe that Christ came to the world and gave us the straight dope as best as we could understand. You can throw Paul in there. I think he was one of the best examples of how God sends folks out to explain things.
None of these revelations told me anything about how to fix a computer or reload for 30-06, and I don't rely on the Bible for this info as a result. I also don't take a sheep herder's word on things like Geology, Astronomy, or Cosmology.
