On the one hand folks, reverently and faithfully, believe in Jesus as a personal savior, and one foundation for that belief is Scripture.
I’m there too!
However, they also kowtow to the literal sense of each word, with a fairly persuasive explanation: “I am unworthy to nitpick the Word of GOD.” And they have the prospect (as I do) of deciding, case by case, whether a given datapoint is history or background. The responsibility begs for great divisions, because a thousand minds with the same basic task will arrive at multiple thousands of coin-flips.
That is wretched and detracts from the holiness of Christ’s sacrifice and the enormous beauty of GOD’s creation and GOD’s loving nature.
But then we get to the “ON THE OTHER HAND” which is that folks who wind up reading the Creation account as both history and science do EXACTLY the same thing w/r/t science that they abhor doing with Scripture.
YES – they nitpick, pick and choose, and erect some of the daffiest sophistries and logical fallacies you will see this side of death. They do this, of course, because science is very, very good at displaying massive proofs that e.g. the universe is 13.78 billion years old, the sun about 5 billion, planet earth about 4.6 billion, single-celled life 3.6 billion, and differentiable species boiling up across the last .6 billion years.
Atheists also look into the heavens and are at peace with the number of stars we can observe being so large it would take twenty-three or twenty-four digits to write the number. That’s a lot, isn’t it? To a Christian, not only is that proof that GOD is lavish beyond our ability to comprehend, it’s also an invitation to look at some of the Hubble images and let our awe brush its fingertips across them.
What bothers me, in short, is that people who refuse to read Genesis with enough slack for GOD to have been speaking a liturgy / deed of title to a pre-linear thinking, pre-scientific Semitic tribe instead of a TED talk on “How I Created the Universe”- – – these same folks turn right around and empower themselves to nit-pick and trash-talk the deep, brilliant studies of tens of thousands of career scientists to prove that those same people are unanimously deluded—either that or they’re atheist conspirators anxious to disprove GOD.
It’s one thing to “be a fool for Christ,” but it’s another thing entirely to be a fool by zip-tying GOD’s word to a rigid misunderstanding.
Oh, and Another Thing 