I've recently been listening to a lecture by Thomas, until recently, of Durham (Tom Wright: recently stepped down as bishop) 'Can a scientist believe in the resurrection?" In it he makes a couple of remarks that I'd like to use to consider how we might think about Genesis 1/the creation.
1. He says that the question of Jesus' resurrection was not a question about the internal state of his followers, but about something that happened in the real public world.
That is, the resurrection as an event was accessible to anyone who was there at the time, independently of that person's views, beliefs or prejudices.
2. He also said that the disciples' transformed world view was only explicable on the assumption that something really did happen (really = an event in material space-time which objectively occurred independently of any observers)
Here it is clear that people's approach to life and their thoughts about their own circumstances and personal trajectories through life were reoriented by something that really happened.
Christian faith is thus not some rarified 'faith in faith', but confidence in the actuality of events that have an affect upon us.
So, the creation, if not something that happened in the real public world in the terms in which God portrays it, is not something that happened meaningfully at all! If it was not accessible, in principle, to anyone who read the text, and could make sense of it, then it is not revealed, but obscured!
Then, the world view that the creation account sets out to create is one that depends on something really having happened. Not something that we are free to characterise ( and therefore characterise God) any way we please, but something that is bound to the context of the revelation; otherwise, it is not this creation that we are talking about, but some other source of the world, built on some other premise, and connected historically to some principle other than the God who has taken pains to tells us the basis for the connection between us and him from which flows the entirety of redemptive history.
