Sigh! Why do the good conversations happen on days I can't be at my computer?
A decent metaphor should at least maintain the order of creation and Genesis does not maintain the same order as evolution.
Why? As noted, even Genesis 2 does not maintain the same order of creation as Genesis 1.
Nowhere in creation does it even hint at change over time, It just says that God created.
I think you mean nowhere in the creation story. In the physical creation there is plenty of evidence of change over time.
Why would God wait billions of years for things to evolve, suffer and die when he could have just created them the way we see them, he sets up the laws, of course!
Why not? It is not as if time has the same meaning to God. God chose the kind of world he wanted to create and the physical properties of its constituents knowing that it would take billions of years just to furnish the elements necessary to life. As it happens, physicists tell us that very small changes in the physical properties of the universe would give us a universe that will not generate stars or sustain life. So maybe we shouldn't second-guess God. This is the world, with its physical laws, that God created and called "very good".
No ones telling me how you can cram evolution into the Bible and have it make sense.
You can't. The biblical authors did not have a concept of evolution in mind, so it is not in the bible. Just as they did not have a concept of outer space, so that is not in the bible. And they had no concept of deep (geological) time so that is not in the bible. And they had no concept of germ theory, so that (as a cause of disease) is not in the bible, and so forth and so on.
What else did he leave out? That the whole thing is a metaphor? That hes just kidding about the whole
thing?
You may have studied biology in college, but it doesn't sound as if you studied literature. Where on earth would you get the idea that using metaphor to describe something means one is just kidding about it?
In fact, much of science is metaphor. "big bang" is metaphor. "tree of life" is metaphor. Germs or viruses "attacking" or "invading" a cell is metaphor. "selfish" genes are a metaphor. Metaphor is a basic means of human expression and has nothing to do with not taking something seriously.
Almost all abstract terms in any language can be traced back etymologically to a metaphor. Metaphor is one of the foundational ways we relate to the world around us and it is not surprising to find the bible is filled with metaphor.
What is very modern (post-Enlightenment and borrowing heavily from philosophical positivism) is the tendency to denigrate metaphor as an inferior way of describing reality
Where's the imperfect reading? its very specific. Creation doesnt leave things up to be misunderstood.
Why would God want to confuse us so much?
That is another modernism----the idea that metaphor is inherently confusing.
What other parts of the bible are just allegories?
Creation reads as a list of events. The story of Jesus reads much more like an allegory.
What I quibble with here is the word "just". Isn't that another way of demeaning allegory as a means of communication? Does it not imply that if one deviates from a strictly empirical, scientifically-definable description one is no longer being "serious" or "accurate" in what one says? Can a poem never speak the truth? Can a parable never be serious?
A lot of the objection to a non-concordist interpretation of Genesis or any other part of the bible rests squarely on a curiously modern notion that literary (as opposed to scientific) description is not serious or truthful description.
I would suggest, as a beginning, that this notion is incorrect and is certainly unbiblical.
What's a reasonable understanding of creation that could account for it being a metaphor for evolution?
Again, I assume you mean the creation stories in Genesis, not the physical creation. And the Genesis creation stories are not metaphors for evolution. They are metaphors for the relationship of God to the physical creation. The biblical authors did not generate metaphors for evolution because evolution was not part of their world-view.
I could make the lyrics of a rap song into a metaphor for creation, but that doesnt mean it is.
Well, yes, if you did that, the rap song would be a metaphor for creation. But I don't think that is what you intended to say. I think you mean it would not be a scientific description of the physical creation.
It contradicts a reasonable interpretation of it, but not an unreasonable one.
That depends on what you define as "reasonable". If you take the view that only an evidence-based description such as you find in scientific journals is a reasonable interpretation of reality, then you put yourself in the box of choosing Genesis as a scientific description of creation or modern geology, cosmology, biology, etc. as a scientific description of creation and you can't choose both as true.
But if you can accept literary, metaphorical descriptions as reasonable in their own right and just as serious and true in their own way as positivistic descriptions there is no need to see Genesis and science in conflict. Each is describing the same reality, but using a different set of descriptive tools. (And don't forget that even scientific descriptions depend heavily on metaphor, too.)
