Those are pretty different stories for divinely inspired writing.
Probably because there are different authors.
Think of it this way: look at the story of, say, Cinderella. There are probably dozens of versions of the story of Cinderella out there, and each of them has a different take on the story. But the **message **of the story remains the same – a young girl forced into servitude by her family eventually finds happiness with her Prince Charming. The details are different in each story, but there’s the same basic message.
It’s the same thing with the Bible. Each Biblical writer had a different style of writing as well as a different audience. Matthew, for example, was primarily concerned with Jewish law and his Jewish audience. Luke, the physician, focused on the miracles of Jesus and his acts of healing. Mark was a disciple of Peter and focused primarily on recording the things he had heard from Peter as accurately as possible.
From
here:
THE tradition of the early Church is unanimous in attributing the second Gospel to Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter the apostle. The historian Eusebius quotes Papias, a disciple of John, as stating this in writing around the year 125:
“Mark, having been the interpreter of Peter, wrote accurately, though not in order, all that he remembered of the things said or done by the Lord. For he had neither heard the Lord nor been his follower, but afterward, as I said, he was the follower of Peter, who gave his instructions as circumstances demanded, but not as one giving an orderly account of the words of the Lord. So that Mark was not at fault in writing certain things as he remembered them. For he was concerned with only one thing, not to omit anything of the things he had heard, and not to record any untruth in regard to them.”
(bolding mine)
It’s the same with Genesis. We don’t know the author of Genesis, but Tradition tells us that the author did not mean to give a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour account of creation. You can’t read Genesis the same way you would read a biology textbook. The author was intending to transmit the message of the story of creation – namely, that we were created by God and in His image, and we have dominion over the plants and animals of the Earth. That’s why there are two creation accounts in Genesis – they’re not two conflicting accounts, but rather two different ways of telling the same story, but with different emphases.
As to the alleged “list of inaccuracies” that you posted from
infidels.org and Skeptic’s Annotated Bible – both were written by people who frankly don’t know how to read the Bible in its proper context. They’re focusing on the silly mundane details that don’t affect** the message of the book as intended by the author**.
Would you read, for example, a letter from your grandmother in the same way you’d read a volume of Emily Dickinson? Of course not. In the same vein, you can’t read Song of Solomon, a book of poetry, in the same way you’d read Romans, a letter to a Christian community.
And if you were reading writing in your journal and wrote the phrase, “It was raining cats and dogs,” would you want your reader to believe that cats and dogs were literally falling from the sky? No, because you know that that particular phrase is just a metaphor that means “it was raining really hard.”
You know that because you live in this particular time and place, but what if, 2000 years from now, an archeologist finds your personal journal and decides that you meant that dogs and cats were literally falling from the sky. That would be an incorrect interpretation of your journal because the interpreter failed to take into account what metaphors were commonly used in the 20th and 21st century, and thus failed to take into account* what your message was * (i.e., that it was raining really hard) as opposed to what your words literally said. In the same way, you can’t read the Bible and interpret it without at least having a working knowledge of the society, customs, etc. of the time and place when that particular book was written. So in 2000 years, the “Skeptic’s Annotated Writings of Tiger08” could say, “Tiger08 clearly wasn’t a real person, because she recorded that cats and dogs fell from the sky as precipitation, an event we know from historical sources was physically and biologically impossible.”
The Catechism states: “According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the
literal and the
spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the
allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses” (CCC 115). (emphasis mine). The mistake of the sites you have cited is that they are only taking into account the literal sense and completely missing the other three.
God gave Adam and Eve a CHOICE to love him or reject him, as he gives all of us a choice. God did make a perfect world without sin, but humans screwed it up – not God. And God sent Jesus to make it right. (Again, C.S. Lewis describes it better than I can in Mere Christianity.)
More like there were 4 different writers, writing at different times (estimated to be at least 45-50+ years after the events occured), and possible combining with oral traditions.