That is an interesting verse there, have you ever noticed the tense Paul uses? In Adam all die, die is present tense, Paul is not talking about everyone dying in Adam back at the fall, but something that is still going on, the human race is still 'in Adam' and continues to die in Adam today. It is worth considering if Paul might be speaking figuratively here, he is taking the story of Genesis yes, but he is interpreting it as a picture of the human race today. We are all Adam, that is what the name means, man or mankind, and in Adam we all sin and die.
You are missing the point, if Adam and Eve are symbolic then the things you take from a literal interpretation are not what the story is really on about, but is describing how we all sin. Do you see the echo of the Genesis story in Paul's description of how he fell, Rom 7:9 I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. Paul was alive, he learned God's command, disobeyed and died. Who did the devil deceive? The whole world. Look at how the book of Revelation reads the serpent in Eden Rev 12:9 And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world--he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.
Yet that is how the apostles preached the gospel.
Creation is very important, but Paul was tellign them god was the creator of all, not telling them how long creation took or how God made everything, neither was he talking about how Adam and Eve were tempted and the fall.
Again, is Paul speaking literally here or figuratively? How was Jesus the last Adam, what about Adam Smith, Adam Faith or Adam Ant? Look at the passage. 1Cor 15:45 Thus it is written, "The first man Adam became a living being"; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.
46 But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual.
47 The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. Was Jesus the second man? Not if you take the bible literally, the second man was Cain and there were probably millions of other men after that. Jesus was hardly the second man, not literally. But Paul is is spaeaking allegorically, apocalyptically even, the whole human race summed up as two men Adam and Christ and everyone on earth is 'in Adam' or 'in Christ'.
Because while God did not literally make Adam out of mud (a very common biblical image that, 'you are the potter we are the clay'), God still made the human race, and he made the human race as Jesus said, male and female. Notice how Jesus never even mentions Adam and Eve. Jesus is also using the story of Genesis as if it was meant as a lesson about marriage. That is an allegorical interpretation of the passage.
Why shouldn't it? Just because Genesis is a poetic description of God's creation, it is still a description of God's creation and proclaims God as creator. Jesus said he was the good shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. Was Jesus a literal shepherd? No. Was he protecting sheep? No. It is a figurative picture of Jesus dying for us on the cross. It is a figurative picture of the cross, but that does not mean cross wasn't real.
You can find the ten commandments again in Deuteronomy, where it says: Deut 5:13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work,
14 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you.
15 You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.
Did God literally use a mighty hand and an outstretched arm to rescue the Israelites? No, it is a figurative description. They still had to keep the commandments.
Creation is true, it is just described figuratively.
What has how we were made got to do with the rights and wrongs of murder? Genesis says we are made of mud, does that mean there is nothing wrong with squishing a bit of mud? Does anybody seriously try to justify abortion by claiming the fetus is in a fish stage? I googled it and all I found were creationist sites claiming it is used as a justification. It is certainly bad biology and I can't imagine anyone with a decent understanding of biology using the argument.
You should google 'ensoulment'. In the medieval church they believed a fetus has not actually got a soul until you feel it moving and that it went through a vegetable and animal stages before it actually received a human soul. Don't blame evolution for the 'the fetus isn't fully human yet' argument.
A false dichotomy I am afraid. We do have an objective moral code in the bible, and people who don't believe the bible have to work out their own moral code, often doing a very good job too. But it has nothing to do with evolution or any other science we have been studying for the last few thousand years deciding what is true about the world and what is not. Even with the moral code of the bible, we have still had to do a lot of work deciding for ourselves what is right and what is wrong, just look at slavery or divorce.
No different from what Copernicus did when he showed the traditional literal interpretation was wrong when it said the sun went round the earth. It just meant we misunderstood those passages. Truth does not change. We cannot actually decide what is true or not. We can get a better understanding of what the truth actually is. That is what science does, why should that be a problem?
To be continued...