I like the way you summarise and synthesise the arguments, John. But doesn’t your own summary position, that “God creates a conscious awareness of the material universe” hit the same buffers of conflict with the “book of science” as any other literal understanding of Genesis? Isn’t the creation of a conscious awareness of what happened at creation saying the same thing as a description of what happened at creation - as described in Genesis 1? The issue remains a creation, in the sequence in which it is described, as opposed to a naturalistic development of life over the aeons, from the simpler forms to the more complex, without external divine assistance.

I personally have more problems with the latter than I do with the former, as explanations of the origins of life. I don’t find that a purely metaphoric understanding of Genesis 1 resolves anything. Somewhere, there remains the question: where did the universe come from, and how reasonable is it to suppose that a divine being had any role in its formation? Mine is a ‘faith’ understanding, but then all understandings rest on a considerable element of faith, just as they all appeal to evidence on which to support their conclusions.

I have therefore provided another view, which is not quite included in your summary, that extraordinary supernatural forces were at work in the initial literal six day creation, but that these were followed by naturalistic developments. This does, of course, have its problems - such as conflict with the evolutionary view that man appeared at the end of an evolutionary process. But it does reconcile other pieces of evidence which stand at variance with the evolutionary view, such as the discovery of creatures which were supposed to have died out millions of years ago, according to the fossil record, at the beginnings of the evolutionary chain - such as the coelacanth, and that peculiar shark creature looking like an eel with its mouth open, which we all saw captured on camera several days ago, a creature supposed to have died out 20 million years ago. In other words, what business do such creatures have being around today, when they should have evolved into something else - like all other well behaved members of species?

I think, too, when we are talking about events which by modern science’s reckoning happened some 4.5 billion years ago, naturalistic science is at the very limits of what can be asserted with any confidence. Science of all kinds, physical and natural, has been shown up as spectacularly wrong in the last hundred years, and this despite the use of ‘science’ to disprove the so-called supertsitions of Christian tradition.