Many people have wondered why God did not provide us with a scientifically accurate account of origins in the book of Genesis. In an online blog, Micah Newman argues against this view as follows:
In giving us the story of the first few chapters of Genesis, God is imparting the most essential theological knowledge on the matter in a way that will be most accessible to the vast majority of people who have ever lived.
Newman then quotes a passage from the article "Genesis and Evolution" by philosopher Peter van Inwagen:
Why doesn't Genesis get it right not only in essence but in detail? Why doesn't Genesis get it wholly right? After all, we expect a reliable source to get even relatively unimportant details right, insofar as it is able, and God knows all the details. The beginning, but not the end, of the answer to this question is that if Genesis did get it right in every detail, most people couldn't understand it. ... A scientifically accurate rewriting of Genesis...would turn it into something all but useless, for the result would be inaccessible to most people at most places and times. Only a few people like you and me—who are simply freaks from the historical and anthropological point of view—could penetrate even its surface. I wonder how many of us believe at some level, that God...regards scientifically educated people as being somehow the human norm and therefore regards Amazonian Indians or elementary-school dropouts as being less worthy of His attention than we; I wonder whether many of us aren't disposed to think that if the Bible were divinely inspired it would be written with the preoccupations of the scientifically educated in mind? I will not bother to quote the very clear dominical and Pauline repudiations of the values that underlie this judgment. Everyone is of equal value to God and the Bible is addressed to everyone.
Later, van Inwagen addresses the question: What does someone who takes Genesis 1 as "literally" as possible come to believe?
This person would thereby come to believe many true things and many false things. Among the false things there would be...the proposition that the alternation of day and night existed before the sun, and the proposition that Aves and Pisces are coevals. We could make quite a list of such false propositions. Here are some of the true ones. That the world is finite in space and time—at least time past. That it has not always been as it is now but has changed from primal chaos into its present form. That it owes its existence and its features to an immeasurably powerful being who made it to serve His purposes. That it was originally not evil and not neutral but simply good. That human beings are part of this world [and] formed from its elements—that they were not separately created and then placed in it like figurines in a China cabinet. That the stars and the moon are inanimate objects and are without any religious significance—that, at least in relation to human beings, their main purpose is to mark the hours and the seasons. That it is not only kings but all men and women who are images of the divine. That human beings have been granted a special sort of authority over the rest of nature. That these divine images, the stewards of all nature, have, almost from their creation, disobeyed God, and have thereby marred the primal goodness of the world and have separated themselves from God and now wander as exiles in a realm of sin and death.
I shall leave the matter there for now.