Third, the point of the biblical creation stories in Genesis 1-2 is not to answer modern questions about exactly when or precisely how all things came about. It is to answer, through an ancient genre for an ancient people, some common human questions, questions about who God is as Creator, what the cosmos is as God's creation, who we are as God's creation, how God as Creator relates to his creation, how we are to relate to our Creator and the rest of his creation, and the like. All subsequent biblical theology—as my first point illustrates—continues in this same trajectory.
Thoughts:
Interesting that he sees Genesis as having the same function as I see, but for completely different reasons!
He thinks it has this function despite having no relation to the real world that we live and move in; whereas I think that it can only have this function by virtue of being entirely about things that happened in and connected with the real world. Indeed with their connection to the real world made clear both in language and the references to shared 'real world' markers (my phrase 'common causality' captures this, but I use it to refer to the spatio-temporal continuity between the effect of God's word for, to and in this world, and its results).
It it that these things happened that they provide the platform for the other things. If they didn’t happen, and I repeat, something else instead did; then God is not shown as an actor in the world, but a figment unrelated to the world. If every point of relational connection is denied, which Pahl does, the whole theory of being that we use, or 'basic ontology' has to be derived from elsewhere. And this is the nub of the problem that I don't think is ever really dealt with in putting Genesis 1, etc. out of ‘this world’ and into some other, emblematic world where none of us really live.
