It is a popular line in much of the evangelical world that Genesis 1, etc. tells us that God is creator, and that creation was ex nihilo, but that the actual facts of creation do not line up with Genesis 1. So Genesis 1 is either pure polemic, or mere rhetoric.
Simply at the level of the pure logic of the claim, it seems to be a nonsensical position to hold: it denies the alignment with events of the only information that we have on which to base our acceptance of God's being creator. The claim is that 'God created, but not how he tells us'. The sceptic is well entitled to deny that our belief in God's being creator can be a serious one.
What is happening here amounts to denying the word of God, and maintaining that his creating was not on his terms, but has to be on our terms (and who are we to say?).
This was the mistake of the Pharisees: they wanted a messiah on their terms, not God's!
In making this move, we evacuate God's revelation of its direct verbal-grammatical meaning, and substitute our own thoughts as to what really must have happened, bending, in many cases to the materialist view of the world, and allowing its claims the ascendency over those of our God! This happens either by accepting the notion of Darwinian evolution, or materialist cosmogony and the accompanying history of the earth, or both; usually both.
I don't know of any other part of scripture where we deny that God can communicate what he wants, and we comfortably substitute our own views!
But this is not a denial without danger: as soon as we substitute our own content, we change the substance of God's information: we say not only that God created, but not how he says, but that the world is other than the Bible sets out.
Our relationship with God throughout the Bible, and its flow of history, is framed in terms of the creation: it sets out who he is, who we are, and grounds the covenant! Setting the details of the account aside means that we set this aside too, and we have to then be content that the world is not the world that God sets out for us, but some other world, where things happen differently, and to which God relates differently.
The theological ramifications are not trivial!
