You cleverly force me to clarify. I see the so called first account of Gen 1 as the transcendent Gods eye perspective complete with rationale for all the forming and filling he did in the 6 days of creation. Basically God does it, says its good, end of day. The second approach starts at ground level and you are right only God could have watched the whole process through.
Both accounts are ground level perspective, at least once the earth was created to have a ground level,
And the spirit of God was hovering over the waters. The experience of the succession of evening and morning places the viewpoint of the observer down on the face of the earth too,
And there was evening and the was morning...
But unlike the first chapter the events are not in the chronological order. The focus is on the man , his creation, Gods special care of him and finally the creation of the woman and the rationale for that. We have two pictures of the same story- Gods transcendence and immanence. The divine and the human. In the first account God is hurling stars into creation , in the second he is walking through a special garden he created for his most precious creation and is interested in how he will name the animals and setting down rules for the newly weds he brought together. Phenomenological may not be the perfect word to describe it but the point is its focus on the history of the man from the ground up rather than from God down.
Certainly we see God is more intimately involved in his creation in the second account, but that is not a reason to say the narrative does not give an order of events, it does, and the order of event are linked by a sequence of waw consecutive verbs as we find throughout Hebrew narrative including histories. To say the narrative does not give a chronological sequence is to say the narrative is not literal. But that is our point isn't it?
True the commonalities in the materials from which both ape and man are constructed are not the issue although the hardware setup e.g.brain size are clearly a factor. The nature of a man has nonetheless been created above that of an ape and the spirit of a man has a nobility lacking in an ape. The achievements of mankind are way beyond that of any apes and indeed there is no comparison on just about any level you choose to compare the two.
Yet we are finding more and more commonalities between man and other apes, in language social relationships, a sense of fairness, the ability to make tools and understand cause and effect. Certainly our abilities vastly outstrip theirs, but ist that what you would expect with larger and more complex brains? After all adults outstrip the abilities of toddlers too, but given enough time for a toddler brain to grow and develop the differences disappear, and great ape intelligence is comparable to a toddlers. Meanwhile in the fossil record we do find hominid brains develop over three million years from about the size of an apes to modern man. Is there any reason to think the differences in ability of ape and human are unrelated to the threefold growth in our brains over the last few million years?
The first man appears to have been formed fully mature and had no childhood as did I. His experience of life is totally unique as is the account of it.
You could read any of the potter and clay verses as claiming God literally made a full sized golem and animated it, the thing is we don't read them that way, so why should we read Genesis that way, especially when you don't take the narrative literally.
You can check heliocentricism in the here and now
Beware of picking the differences between heliocentrism and evolution and using them as an excuse to reject evolution. Yes we learned to change our interpretation of scripture when astronomy told us we got it wrong, yes it would be a mistake to insist on geocentrism because our interpretation of scripture says the sun goes round the earth, but evolution is different. Every science will have some differences you can latch onto as an excuse to reject it, but the church had the wisdom to accept heliocentrism with much less evidence than we have for evolution, just as the early church rejected the voices calling for a rejection or a round earth in favour of a biblical flat earth, and claimed a round earth was speculation because no one has gone there and come back to tell us what it is like. But the church followed what science said again with less evidence than we have for evolution.
and there is no question of your observations being based on incomplete or degraded evidence as with evolution.
How many planets are there in the universe orbiting stars? How many objects in the solar system orbiting the sun? How many angles did we observe the orbits of the planets from to see how they really moved? We had only observed a half dozen planets and a couple of moons, and all of the orbits were observed side on, and it all could be made fit a geocentric model with a few epicycles added in. There was no way to observe anything other than relative motion and no way to identify what was changing velocity. Terribly incomplete data, but the heliocentrism model gave an more elegant fit than the geocentric, unlike with evolution which is the only model that explains the distribution of of organisms and fossils. As for degraded, that is one of the strengths of science because it uses rates of decay, and while fossils like hominids show the signs of age, there is more than enough evidence to compare bone structures through the ages and measure cranial capacity.
You cannot check evolution in the same way as heliocentricism as that would involve time travel and physical presence at the key moments.
And space travel was just as impossible in the 17th century, yet no one conceived the idea of using the impossibility of impossible tests to reject a science they did not like. Science back then relied on possible tests, and the possible tests confirmed heliocentrism, though much more slowly and much fewer than they have confirmed evolution.
None of its processes are observable on the macro level now and none have even been duplicated by scientists, even though micro level adaptations by species to their environment clearly are demonstrable they do not prove macro evolution..
No one had ever travelled into space to see if the sun moon or other planets really did have a gravitational pull and that their hypothetical gravitational force could pull objects like rockets into circular or elliptical orbits. The only gravity that had ever been observed was the earth's and it pulled objects straight down to the earth, or if you accepted Galileo's claim, in a parabola if an object is shot at speed. No scientists had ever observed extra terrestrial gravity or seen the only gravity it had demonstrated pull objects into circular or elliptical orbits.
