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Oh, I think you are right to be suspicious. I doubt there was the concensus Barr claimed even 30 years ago. But it is still the better way to find experts today who do disagree. That is solid evidence of a change in opinion.

If it is entirely possible that opinion has not changed, no one needs to show that it has not changed. It is ok to assume that until there is evidence to the contrary. OTOH, evidence is required if one claims that it has changed. That's the way one works in science. One accepts established...

IOW you cherry pick your evidence to get agreement with your conclusions.

It was when he wrote it.

I love that book! Have you read the sequels as well?

The ancient cosmology which the biblical writers worked with considered the primeval creation to consist wholly of water. The creation of the firmament was for the purpose of creating a space in the waters. So the waters above the firmament, like the waters under the earth are the primeval...

Of course No we don't. I know of no reason Jesus cannot speak of fictional people. I don't know that marking a time-line is of particular importance. I would agree they all mark significant interactions between God and the people of Israel which are examples to us all.

I agree with the final sentence. Not sure about the first, but not interested in discussing it either.

Yet scripture never speaks of "going to Heaven" as if it were a place apart from earth. What it does speak of is the reign of God coming to earth. Rev. 21:3 Then one will no longer speak of "heaven and earth" for they will be one. God himself will then dwell on earth in the new Jerusalem and...

Yes, that would be correctly stated. Again, in literature, "myth" is just a genre, a way of telling a story. It is not a comment on the truth or falsity of the story. Of course, I am well aware the popular meaning is quite different. So I try to avoid the term unless I can explain what I mean...

That is irrelevant. Paul did. This was the foundation of his education.

He wasn't lying. He believed it himself; it was part of his family tradition that they were descendants of a child of Venus. Or we can take it more seriously. I don't think this is the dichotomy you assume it is. The historical beliefs of its human writers will have an impact on what is...

Which really means you believe the events described are actual historical events. We have perfectly good words to say that with: actuality, historical, real (or actual) history. It messes conversation up a lot to add in "literal". We end up with a term that has multiple and semi-conflicting...

I didn't say God did. And I see no reason to call a symbolic story a fib. Just because the truth is presented in a symbolic story does not make it less true. Paul was trained in rabbinical interpretation. Until you understand how the rabbis of the time understood Adam, you don't understand...

Some real people claim they do. Julius Caesar claimed the goddess Venus as an ancestor. Until it was repudiated after WWII, the emperor of Japan claimed descent from the Sun God. Besides, we don't know that ancient people wrote or understood genealogies as we do. It is not uncommon in...

Oh, it is not quite that simple. Look up bacterial conjugation. Furthermore, in the Lenski set up, each population is descended from a single bacterial cell, so they are all clones of each other with exactly the same genome. So even if it were that simple, there was nothing new to get from the...

Not at all. I fully believe the bible was inspired. I just don't put the limits on inspiration that you apparently do. I believe the Holy Spirit is capable of inspiring symbolic and imaginative presentations of truth, much as Jesus did in his stories. Note the second item in my signature.

That's not a problem. That is exactly what did happen in the E. coli experiment. The second beneficial mutation occurred over a thousand generations after the first.

If the story, and the characters in it, are not historical in the first place, references to the story by later writers do not confer historical reality on it.

Are you speaking to me? My background is language and literature. In that context "literal" refers to a non-symbolic use of a word or phrase, irrespective of the genre of literature in which it is found. So when the nursery rhyme says "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water"...