Indeed, dear brother in Christ, you note the critical distinction that so many people completely miss; i.e. that creating and forming are qualitatively different acts — and Genesis addresses them both.
The first is creation de novo, ex nihilo — a something that comes into existence out of nothing; the second utilizes what has already been created. The second is accessible to the natural sciences; the first is not. At least, not under the prevailing scientific model of methodological naturalism.
Which tells me that methodological naturalism is leaving out something necessary to the full explication of "All that there is." It can only give a partial account of the natural world in its fulness.
Just a thought. Thank you oh so very much, dear brother in Christ, for your telling, astute observation re: this "grave error!"
Current science tries everything to avoid the ‘creation’ or beginning of our universe – but it fails on a logical basis. If there was an infinite past to nature we would never reach ‘here and now’. Nature must have a beginning for time to progress – and an infinite past would never start the stopwatch. An infinite amount of universes, or the multiverse, does not solve the problem either - nature still needs a beginning because it exists within time.
"A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God."Natural – matter, energy, laws of physics, space, time.
-Steven Hawkings
Hawkings is correct, before the ‘creation’ or beginning (Big Bang) there were no natural processes. Regardless of this fact, we know that natural processes cannot create natural processes (circulus in probando). So we are logically left with ‘creation’ from the supernatural.