One of the 'problems' of theology is whence the possibility of relationship between the eternal God and man in his finite world, between the eternal and the temporal.
This is done in Genesis 1 where God acts in our time-constrained and
physical world, with physical effect and rational (existential) causality by his
will (his word): the stage-setting intersection of eternity and
humanity, enabling the reciprocal communion between us and God because we are in God's
image: like him in aspects of our nature; and he is existentially active, really present,
in our world. Being here, so we can be with him. He demonstrates this in Genesis 1 (demonstration being better than mere assertion) as he tells us what and how he did.
The incarnation completes and authenticates this: with God in Christ
being one of us, but God and man, rescuing us from our alientation from
our Creator. Both concretely grounded in the Real. The Real, where we
sweat, weep, laugh and love.
This goes further and joins God's nature, his being, with our existential experience; but only, again, on the basis of God demonstrating his existential sharing in our temporal world: the whole point of Genesis 1 as a concrete realist account of events.
It solves what I call Rorty's dilemma, which Rorty sketches in this wonderful essay Trotsky and the Wild Orchids. Where it leaves Rorty reminds me of Schaeffer's comments (in The God Who Is There) of John Cage's similar dilemma. Cage made 'deconstructed' music, but couldn't safely pursue his hobby of wild mushroom collecting (and eating) in similar fashion. Cage's assertions about the world did not work. Without a rigiourous order and classification system for his mushrooms he would not avoid sudden liver failure and certain death. His world and its meaning did not intersect as did not Rorty's in that essay.
As the church broadly embraces the conceit of Paganism in imagining impossibly long ages for Earth's existence (but, ironically, insufficiently long for evolution to even theoretically operate), it puts everyone in Rorty's and Cage's position: their irrationality of the intellect fails to play out in life. Denying Genesis, we do the same: endorse the impossible life and its conceits, obstructing the gospel at every turn, and keeping people on the road to perdition, with a God detached existentially from our world and therefore relationship.
Not only this, but we reinforce the unreality of Genesis 1 by making it a mere symbol, or figure, or a 'framework' of something else. The trouble is, if Genesis is not true to events, then it conveys nothing about the Real, rather it leaves us in the Hindu position of illusion.
Our real reality is defined by what really is (and the source is essential to understanding this), and if our reality comes otherwise than Genesis 1 sets out, then it is that something else which is basically definitional of us, our lives and relationships.
PS, all that said, Cage's piece 4'33 is worth listening to.
