Thank you for that. This is a topic that has become a favorite of mine. I hope a rather lengthy Response can be tolerated.

Overall, to my mind the first few chapters of Geneis is an attempt to answer the questions, "How is it that human beings so different from the rest of Creation, and to what purpose?"

One point I like making is that, while the "Young Earth" doctrine is wrong about the age of the planet, it is an excellent estimation of the age of civilization: the last we hear of Cain in the Bible is that he builds "the world's first city." Is the Bible saying that civilization is what you get when human beings are separated from God?

Also, "man and woman" are created in Chapter 1 of Genesis. Adam and Eve are created in Chapter 2--he with the specific task of tending to 'God's garden' that He provided for Adam and his descendents. Might Chapter 1 refer to Homo erectus and Chapter 2 to Homo sapiens? Could that be a faint echo from the days when the two species were co-existing on the planet?

In general, if you look only at the sequence of events of the creation narrative in Chapter 1 (there is another one in Chapter 2), and not get bogged down in details of temporality, there is very little difference between science and the Bible: for instance when, according to the Bible God said, "Let there be light" before the Sun was created, could that be interpreted as what we call the Big Bang (but could be more accurately called the Phenomenal Flash)?