The theological purpose of Genesis usually gets ignored when these chapters become the center of debate about ‘science and the Bible’. Both atheistic scientists and fundamentalist Christians simply assume that it is appropriate to read them as a scientific text. This ignores some basic considerations of the way the people were living and how people interpreted things at the time. Christians claim that God has been revealed most fully in a particular person who lived at a particular time in a particular culture. This was the culmination of God’s method of self-revelation recorded in the Hebrew Bible, in which God’s word comes to us clothed in the words of particular people, using particular languages and particular forms of literature, all rooted
