You're right. The Bible is written in many different literary styles---historical narrative, poetry, metaphor, parable, genealogies, letters. For believers, we have the ability to clearly understand when Jesus was speaking in parables, and we recognize metaphor and poetry when we see it. Genesis is written as straightforward history.
Later Biblical authors referred to Genesis in a literal manner, and Jesus twice mentioned the first male and female as being made in the beginning, which is the opposite of evolutionary teaching.
"To me, the slow unfolding of billions of years of creation through evolution sounds awesome and majestic - something only God could put into motion. Not un-Biblical at all."
Well, it would be if He had chosen to do it that way, but He clearly didn't. And I don't understand how creating everything in six days is any less awesome and majestic...to me, it's much more so.
Psalm 33 says "He spoke and it was done."
I don't think His message was to tell people whether or not Genesis was literal or not. His message was that God created everything.
Later Biblical authors referred to Genesis in a literal manner, and Jesus twice mentioned the first male and female as being made in the beginning, which is the opposite of evolutionary teaching.
I look at it like this: Jesus healed the leper. Now, with the gifts of wisdom, intelligence, and through hard work, we can heal lepers. We can heal fevers and can even sometimes make the lame walk. Jesus could have just explained how antibiotics, aspirin, and autologous stem cell transplants work, but humanity was not ready for that.
Well, it would be if He had chosen to do it that way, but He clearly didn't. And I don't understand how creating everything in six days is any less awesome and majestic...to me, it's much more so.
Humanity was not ready for what we'd eventually come to know about the Earth - that it is not 6,000 years old, and that it took much longer; in the same way explaining those things above. Genesis is true, because God doesn't lie, but who knows what God's days are like?
We were given intelligence and the desire to learn by God. Rejecting science is like rejecting medicine and doctors, and demanding that Jesus heal us. Sometimes, he uses doctors. Sometimes he doesn't, but it isn't our place to deny the gifts of intelligence and wisdom that He gave only to humanity.
We have vestigial traits like the Plica Semilunaris and muscles behind our ears that serve no purpose, except in lower species. God isn't in the business of fooling us, and He isn't in the business of being told what He can and cannot be or do.
Six Days would have been awesome, but scientific evidence doesn't point in that direction. My belief in evolution has never, not even once made me question my belief in God or Jesus or the Holy Ghost. Not for a second. The idea that Creation unfolded over eons and ages, and that God knows everything, every grain of sand, every cell, every creature, since the dawn of time, leaves me in awe of His majesty and love for us.
Psalm 33 says "He spoke and it was done."
But He also said that all would not be told to those who couldn't understand.
Matthew 13:10-13:
10 And his disciples came and said to him: Why speakest thou to them in parables?
11 Who answered and said to them: Because to you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven: but to them it is not given.
12 For he that hath, to him shall be given, and he shall abound: but he that hath not, from him shall be taken away that also which he hath.
13 Therefore do I speak to them in parables: because seeing they see not, and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.