Genesis: is it to be taken literally?

This subject has been discussed pretty extensively in the "Dates and Dating" forum. Just for starters, there are a dozen or so lines of evidence from radioisotopes that all point to "old" in most every rock you pick up.

Huh, that's odd! My dad was a missionary and minister for about 45 years, and never felt that a six-day creation or Noah's Flood were literal....and the same goes for about half the Christians in the U.S. Why is that, do you think?

That's nice. I'm glad you put the part before the comma, or I might have thought you were saying "No True Christian (TM) can believe that way...."
It's interesting, isn't it, that you guys (or the C of C down here, at least) hold it as an article of faith that you can't have a piano in the church because it's not in the New Testament, but you will allow pews, and carpet, and central heat and air, and PA systems? There are quite a wide variety of folks with wildly divergent views on this sort of thing who all say they're Christians. As an outsider, I don't see much indication of which bunch, if any, has The Truth (TM). And if anybody I ever met walked the walk in addition to talking the talk, it was my dad.

So if I write a book and in it claim it's The Truth that makes it, in reality, The Truth.
Yeah.

Uhhh....wasn't Augustine before Darwin by about 1500 years?

Christians (heck, Europeans....) before the time of Copernicus and Galileo almost all took the numerous passages in the Bible that indicate that the Earth is "immovable" or "fixed," apparently at the center of the universe, literally as well.
For one example, Cardinal Bellarmine wrote, in regard to Galileo: (from Internet History Sourcebooks )And Luther: ( http://latter-rain.com/ltrain/coper.htm )Precisely as in the case of astronomy in the 1600's and 1700's, the sciences of geology and biology have moved on in the last couple of centuries. Do you really think, Terry, that we can now put probes onto Saturn's biggest moon because NASA has "compromised with the so called evidence" of heliocentrism? We have, here in 2005, a tremedously larger body of evidence for a 4.5 billion year old earth and 500 million years' worth of our vertebrate ancestors than astronomy had for a sun-centered solar system until the space age. The very first uncontrivertable evidence that the Earth really moved was the discovery of parallax in the 1830's! Knowledge grows with time, man. Even if it finds things that don't agree with sacred texts.

Of course it does. But it also uses language like the following:"1 Chronicles 16:30: He has fixed the earth firm, immovable.Psalm 93:1: Thou hast fixed the earth immovable and firm ...Psalm 96:10: He has fixed the earth firm, immovable ...Psalm 104:5: Thou didst fix the earth on its foundation so that it never can be shaken.Isaiah 45:18: ...who made the earth and fashioned it, and himself fixed it fast...These are what Bellarmine and Luther were talking about: plain teaching of the Prophets. I would like to invite you to pick a couple of pieces of this evidence that you think are the most convincing and start a thread in the Dates and Dating forum.

That's part of my point. What is it that makes it impossible that you are mistaken about what Genesis says, and that the Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics, and Anglicans are closer to what it means?

The King James was published quite a while after Luther was dead, and published by relatively enlightened folks who may well have been aware that the Earth orbited the Sun. That could account for their choice of language. A century earlier, before science started stirring so much, a translation might have been a little closer to whatever Luther and Bellarmine used.

Likely for the same reason that they allow for a heliocentric solar system - that's what fits with what we see around us.

Brian! Arachnophilia! Are you guys in the building? This guy needs some help.....