Biblical knowledge is every bit as valid (and then some) in its description of how things were and are. Don't let them tell you any different.
this is at the root of the hermeneutical problem.
interestingly i believe that a skeptic and unbeliever sees the issues better than many Christians.
Scientific findings...ought to be judged on their own merits, regardless of the ethical connotations some people might see in them. Ethical choices, OTOH-while they should certainly be informed by the best science available-are too important to be left only in the hands of scientists. ... This confusion between the purposes of science and religion is of course based on the fundamentalists' misunderstanding of their sacred scriptures as not only books on how to live, but also descriptions of how the universe works. By the same token, the, scientific discoveries must describe not only how the world is, but how it should be. This is perhaps the single most tragic mistake repeatedly made by both sides of the debate, though much more often by the religious side than the scientific side. pg 25
from: Denying Evolution: Creationism, Scientism, and the Nature of Science
by Massimo Pigliucci
God is not directly writing Scripture to us. He is writing it to those first readers of it, using their humanity to accommodate Himself to their frailities, their culture and to their history. The issue is if God is teaching that description He is using to communicate as a transcultural, forever true in all places and to all people. The BIG problem with thinking that everything in the Scriptures is equally authoritative as in being taught as binding on all believers is that we already make this distinction between moral, ceremonial and civil uses of the Law for exactly these reasons, God is not teaching that the Law is binding on believers in the exact same way as it was on Moses' flock, to whom the books were first written.
Why not? why do we make this distinction, not only between the types of the law(moral ceremonial civil) but between the 3 uses of the Law as well?
Because we are uniquely aware that people have misused the Law to drive the church into legalism over the centuries. What essentially legalism is, is that process of taking the Law as being taught not just to the Jews but to all subsequent believers.
This is the analogous problem to taking the form of the ideas, the structure of thought, the very cultural and societal and historical particulars that God is using to communicate to us as binding on us in the same way that they formed the structure of early Jewish thought.
Genesis presents a very specific cultural and historical model of the universe.
solid firmament, very young earth, flat, the sun revolves around it, hell below your feet, heaven where God is above your head.
this are as specifically Hebraic as the command not to boil a kid in it's mothers milk or any other of the specifically cultural context of the Law.
Can we learn from it? is it inspired and authoritative and from God? of course, just not as binding our conscienceness so that we can not look at the universe and see what God has told us there about how the universe really is and how it really was formed by His hands. These are great metaphors and paradigms for thinking, but they are not modern scientific descriptions of reality, they are ancient modes of thought that are not being taught but being used.
