I've just read "Creation without Compromise" by Donald Crowe. Not a bad read, IMO. The book is fairly wide ranging, but has the central theme of one's view of origins being about, at root, the 'world-view' one adopts.
The book argues this well, without referring to what I think is a landmark book in this area, The Myth of Religious Neutrality, by Clouser. (Clouser is an evolutionist, as it happens). This results in one being able to say, I think, cogently, that the debate about origins (creation vs. evolution) is not a debate about 'science' vs. 'religion', where the science side thinks it gets the upper hand (but which just goes to prove what a philosopher I heard once say, only proves that scientists make poor philosophers), but is purely a religious debate.
Thus, putting paid to the tivial comment one often hears that 'the Bible is not a science textbook'. As though this was ever a question!
The author makes much of the importance of chronology as being the structure for history, and that the Bible gives us substantial chronological information, and does so quite self-consciously: that is, one doesn't have to go hunting for it.
Chronology does a couple of things in this connection, that rarely seems to be picked up in discussion.
1. It acts much the same way as the provenance of a document does for an historian. It gives us certitude about the connection of the document with that which it purports to report. Thus, in the Bible, the chronology gives us structuring information that goes to the historical credibility of its reports. If you can't give the chronological coordinates of your history, then the certitude of it being history reduces.
2. Similarly to (1) above, it shows us our connection to God. It is not some vague or mystical connection, conjoured out of hope or wishful thinking, but a connection that is tangible in terms of what makes things tangible in our life and times.
Adding 1 and 2, the creation, and indeed Biblical history, occured in this world, with the delimiters that position and relate every other event in this world: time and place (space). It is prosaically explicable, and not a mystery accessible only to those 'in the know'; but is, at least in principle, public knowledge.
If you can't give the coordinates of your story (of creation) then, it remains a story, and the real world must be explained in some other way.
