Peter –

It’s therefore, for me, a statement of faith to say that I believe in a God who created the world in an orderly fashion, and that the created world was in itself a good place, with life that was created inherently good, as opposed to a chaotic place where life was governed by inherently amoral or evil forces (as seen in other creation stories).

These are the core truths as generally agreed within the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the Genesis creation narrative affirms these truths. But where does knowledge of these truths come from in the first place? It’s not intuitively obvious that the material universe was created or designed by a supernatural force. As you observed, belief in god doesn’t by definition mean belief in a creator-God. The early Christian era was roiled by turmoil over whether God created the material universe (Jewish), whether matter and spirit are coeternal (pagan and Greek), or whether the material world was created by the devil (Gnostic). The Jewish interpretation eventually prevailed in Christian orthodoxy, with Torah and religious tradition proving decisive in resolving the dispute.

Skepticism regarding cosmological science is probably the norm among contemporary Christians. It’s conceivable – it may even be a tenet of the Christian faith – that Newton’s first law describes the process by which the Prime Mover makes things move. But it’s also possible to describe a host of phenomena without invoking God’s invisible hand. The same could be said for less firmly established areas of empirical science like evolution and cosmology. Formulating, testing and refining naturalistic hypotheses is what empirical science does. Even the most strongly supported scientific findings neither affirm nor deny supernatural involvement “behind the veil.”

So: Neither a belief in god nor an understanding of how the material universe works necessarily leads to belief in a creator-god. As you acknowledge, belief in the Creator is a matter of faith. And what is the source of this faith? Tradition within the community, Scriptural authority, the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. If Genesis 1-3 is the original source of knowledge of the creator-God, then the text merely affirms its own truth. If the source is the religious tradition that produced the Genesis text, then why did the author include speculative details that aren’t essential truths? Either way, it seems that even the faithful interpreter has to account for details that don’t stand up to evidentiary scrutiny.

The Genesis account is mythical as opposed to scientific in the modern sense of the word, but for me, it is myth which does have a historical basis. That isn’t a contradiction, but it is a statement of faith. Like the scientific explanation, there is a good deal of evidence to support this view - but not all the evidence will satisfy the current explanations of empirical science.

You invoke evidence in support of the creator-God, but you also acknowledge that the evidence won’t satisfy modern empirical science. The evidence to which you allude: does it support the Genesis narrative, not just in general but in specifics? If not, then you need to decide something about either the evidence or the Biblical text. Of course there have been attempts at reconciling the text with the data. Since you talk about a universe that’s billions rather than thousands of years old, you perhaps subscribe to Day-Age Theory or Gap Theory to justify this extended non-Biblical time horizon. Still the problems remain: fruit trees are created before the sun, and so on.

Hence the “True Myth” idea: it avoids invoking even more esoteric and complicated literal reconciliations by assigning the Biblical text to a literary genre in which details aren’t intended to be read as facts about the world. The True Myth notion has been floating around in a kind of vague fideistic haze. Hence my elaboration of how the mythic genre might be interpreted to distinguish truth from fiction. The implicit question is whether True Myth adequately reconciles truth, faith, text, and evidence. The alternatives, it seems to me, are to look harder for a literal reconciliatory reading of the text or to acknowledge that the Genesis narrative contains errors.

… and still the seven scrolls remain unread; the eighth seal, unbroken…