Many of you are aware of my preoccupation with Genesis. It is both a blessing and a curse, but a good kind of curse. Said preoccupation, naturally, results in my reading a lot about Genesis. I am forever grateful to the publishers who have provided books for me to review at my request, and I am especially thankful to those who have taken the initiative to ask me to review books related to Genesis.
From much of this recent reading, several thoughts have emerged (most are obvious):
Efforts to reconcile the "creation" account in Genesis with "science" are futile, if fun to read. There is far too big a gap between the ancient Israelite culture and language and present-day Western culture and English to even know all that is meant by Genesis 1 & 2, much less prove what we cannot know. Absent a Mosaic or Pauline revelation from the Lord Himself (which I am still anxiously anticipating, whereafter I will immediately post all the answers), I'm afraid we will always be left wondering.
We shouldn't stop wondering. The futility in seeking answers to ultimately unanswerable questions is no reason to stop asking. There are plenty of lessons to be learned short of, but probably more important than, the actual who's, what's, when's and where's (why's deliberately excluded because we should know the why's).
Fighting about it is also pointless. And we should stop that. Honestly, has anyone ever been converted by argument. Christian's bashing anything or anyone acknowledging scientific evidence as such doesn't help our cause.
No theory is exactly right, but maybe none of them are entirely wrong either. And isn't that really the beauty of the Bible, generally, and Genesis, particularly. Do these ideas have to be exclusive of the others? Certainly not. The array of plausible ideas is perhaps the best evidence of a God worthy of our praise and His multi-dimensional Word worthy of our study.