This is the part where we disagree:
"It does not make any sense if this was just a fictional story or the account of a local flood to contain the type of language and detail that it does, especially as the inspired Word of God. If we cant read this and trust that its an actual historical account, then what can we trust in the book of Genesis. Without the foundations of Genesis, the whole Bible comes into question."
First of all, many mythological accounts get VERY detailed in their descriptions, even though they know it is not true history, so the level of detail is not conclusive. Second, the fact that it is inspired does not require the text to be read as historically literal. Again C.S. Lewis is insightful on this:
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I have therefore no difficulty in accepting, say, the view of those scholars who tell us that the account of Creation in Genesis is derived from earlier Semitic stories which were Pagan and mythical. We must of course be quite clear what "derived from" means. Stories do not reproduce their species like mice. They are told by men. Each re-teller either repeats exactly what his predecessor had told him or else changes it. He may change it unknowingly or deliberately. If he changes it deliberately, his invention, his sense of form, his ethics, his ideas of what is fit, or edifying, or merely interesting, all come in. If unknowingly, then his unconscious (which is so largely responsible for our forgettings) has been at work. Thus at every step in what is called--a little misleadingly--the "evolution" of a story, a man, all he is and all his attitudes, are involved. And no good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights. When a series of such retellings turns a creation story which at first had almost no religious or metaphysical significance into a story which achieves the idea of true Creation and of a transcendent Creator (as Genesis does), then nothing will make me believe that some of the re-tellers, or some one of them, has not been guided by God.
Thus something originally merely natural--the kind of myth that is found amongst most nations--will have been raised by God above itself, qualified by Him and compelled by Him to serve purposes which of itself would not have served. Generalising this, I take it that the whole Old Testament consists of the same sort of material as any other literature--chronicle (some of it obviously pretty accurate), poems, moral and political diatribes, romances, and what not; but all taken into the service of Gods word. Not all, I suppose, in the same way. There are prophets who write with the clearest awareness that Divine compulsion is upon them. There are chroniclers whose intention may have been merely to record. There are poets like those in the Song of Songs who probably never dreamed of any but a secular and natural purpose in what they composed. There is (and it is not less important) the work first of the Jewish and then of the Christian Church in preserving and canonising just these books. There is the work of redactors and editors in modifying them. On all of these I suppose a Divine pressure; of which not by any means all need have been conscious."
C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958), 109
God can use the fictional, or semi-fictional, to convey absolute truth.
You then use the slippery slope argument to say that we MUST accept it as literal, because to fail to do so calls the rest of Scripture into question. This is fallacious reasoning. We must consider each text on its own. Do we doubt the historicity of the Gospels because we treat Job as non-historical, or read parables as non-historical, or see figurative meaning in Song of Solomon? No, we must take each text on its own and consider the degree to which it should be taken as literal history or whether the absolute and holy truths are being conveyed through texts which are not literal history?
It must be remembered that, whether we read some of the texts of Genesis as non-historical or all of it as literal history, there are still "issues" either way. With the non-historical, we have to consider the issue of the genealogies (which I have dealt with elsewhere). With a literal reading, we would have to deal with the Cain issue, the two Creation account issue, etc. Even excluding the evidence of God's Creation itself, we must resolve these issues and, thus, exegesis and interpretation are in order.
Personally, even before I ever considered the evidence from God's Creation, I had come to the tentative conclusion that the non-historical reading of portions of Genesis was most likely correct, having considered all these issues, the style of the text itself, etc. The weight of the evidence from God's Creation simply reinforced that belief.
Let me know when you would like to debate this by PM and I would be happy to have the discussion with you.
