..."why should we assume that Moses was writing a scientific account of creation, as opposed to a theological one? Why try to harmonize it according to science at all, if that was not Moses' intent?"
Climacus,
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Not to be overly contentious, but how do we know with such certainty what the "intent" of Moses (and the Triune God) was in the writing of the Torah? The Hebrews have long believed that the entire history of the cosmos was encoded within the Torah--which is why Hebrew scribes were carefully instructed for centuries to not alter a single letter of the Torah, lest they alter the course of the cosmos. And they didn't. Medieval copies of Old Testament texts correspond very precisely with those found among the Dead Sea scrolls. I think Schroeder (an Orthodox Jew) makes a rather compelling case that the text of [i]Genesis,[/i] properly translated, may be more astoundingly scientific than modern Protestant (and Orthodox--viz., Tarazi) Bible scholars ever imagined, in their wildest positivisitic interpretations.