Natural Selection

21And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;

22And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

23And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

24Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

Looking at these two verses, and the rest of the two chapters, you're saying this is all metaphorical?

They can certainly write with much greater knowledge and understanding of scientific matters than the many human beings who wrote the texts in the bible. There is no contest at all.

Note that the contents of the bible were selected by the bishops of the 4th century (and those who wrote similar texts that were not selected). Actually that's an oversimplification - the selection occurred at many different times, and there is not a single bible, there are different choices of what ancient writings should be included in it. The Catholic bible contains 7 more books, and all Christians for more than a thousand years up the the time of the human being Martin Luther would have counted these as part of the bible.

There's no question, that's intriguing but much too early to be able to draw such outlandish conclusions.

I've just finished watching a documentary on that very subject (one of the BBC's excellent Horizon series) & a few important facts were mentioned. The original discovery of surviving blood cells in a dinosaur bone date back to 1991 but in 2000, paleontologist Bob Harmon was prospecting in Hell's Creek, Montana & he spotted something interesting - a bleached bone sticking out of a cliff.

Very quickly he realised it belonged to a T-Rex. The thing that made his heart sink was that the specimen was at the bottom of a column of rock that was fifty feet thick! All that rock would have to be removed first. Something about the geology of that area is highly unusual & helps to preserve softer material that would normally be lost.

Of course rock strata 50 feet thick takes many millions of years to form. There isn't any process known in which it might have been able to form in only some thousands of years.

In the process of excavation, a very large bone had to be broken in two & the shattered remnants were sent to Mary Schweitzer for analysis. She identified something within the bone that she hadn't expected to see - 'medullary bone' of the kind that is only found in certain modern birds & then only in pregnant females!

After dissolving away the fossilised bone with acid, she was surprised to be left with softer cartilage like material in which could be seen the remains of blood vessels.

But one thing she certainly doesn't accept is that this points to such dinosaurs being alive less than 60 million years ago.

see: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur-shocker-115306469/

Meanwhile, Schweitzer’s research has been hijacked by “young earth” creationists, who insist that dinosaur soft tissue couldn’t possibly survive millions of years. They claim her discoveries support their belief, based on their interpretation of Genesis, that the earth is only a few thousand years old. Of course, it’s not unusual for a paleontologist to differ with creationists. But when creationists misrepresent Schweitzer’s data, she takes it personally: she describes herself as “a complete and total Christian.” On a shelf in her office is a plaque bearing an Old Testament verse: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

I don't want to turn this into a Bible lesson but on the precise wording at the beginning of Genesis, does it represent your (supposed) 'God' as telling the author(s) that He had done these things, or are the authors telling the story in the third person?

That's to say as if they understood this to be the case but hadn't explicitly been told so by any deity.

I believe that God Himself wrote the first part of Genesis, due to the wording. 

Also, someone can say they are a Christian for all their life, and go to church, get baptized, even become preachers, but they are never really Christians. They may believe in Jesus, they may read the Bible, but that doesn't make them a Christian.

But does it say in the text anywhere that this was so? Otherwise, it's reasonable to assume the original text was written down according to an oral tradition that had existed for centuries, a tradition in which it was common to represent those verses as if they were the words of their 'God'.

Those verses may be poetical but only the kind of poetry that men are more than capable of writing for themselves. If something looks like a creation myth then it most probably is.

The way it was written seems first person to me... At least the first 10 verses.

There is, as has already been pointed out, a possibility that some parts of the Bible are not exactly what Jesus told us, due to errors in translation or oral inconsistencies. However so many people were involved in this process that I'd imagine the errors are minimal as they would be able to catch and correct each other. To me personally metaphors seem like the best answer.

But, we, as Christians, believe the Bible, right?

Yes, but once again, we try to understand what it says in the context of modern science, so that religion and science can coexist.

Well, Christianity is first and foremost a relationship with Jesus, so not really a religion. So you believe all of what the Bible says?

For instance "let there be light" might be interpreted as God created energy, including photons, during the birth of the universe. This is just my guess though.

Yes, though not all of it I see as direct and straight forward.

So you believe it when it says “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.” - Isaiah 40:7

There are some parts of the Bible that are metaphors, but I don't believe that most of the Old Testament is. It's a stretch to say that the creation story is a metaphor.

Wow I think we're starting to understand each other a bit better. So metaphors do exist in the Bible, you just don't think that specific part of the Bible is a metaphor. Well from an astronomical standpoint, the Sun is definitely older then 6,000 years. Can you agree that the creation of the sun during this week was metaphorical?

No. What makes the sun seem like it is over 6000 years old?

Yes, great line, I think the metaphor was that the word of God is eternal.

Well, there isn't really a metaphor there, just Isaiah saying how the Word of God will last forever, no matter who translates it or anything.