Nothing you are about to read is scientifically verified. Science, archaeology, historical study, and religion all cannot pinpoint any of these facts with certainty. So, relax and read on.
A long time ago, God created a man named Adam and a woman named Eve. This was roughly around 4000 BC, possibly much earlier. The reason God created them seems to be that He took great pleasure in creating humanity and imprinting His image upon them. He sought to have an eternal relationship with His created beings, whom He enabled and commissioned to procreate.
This origin story was passed on orally from family to family for thousands of years. As it is with oral transmission, the story changes along the way. People do the best they can, but it’s a bit like that phone tag game we used to play as kids. One kid whispers a sentence into another kid’s ear, and this process repeats multiple times until the kid on the other end hears something quite different from what was originally transmitted.
It is possible that in the couple thousand years that oral transmission about God’s creation occurred, that some people may have attempted to write the story down. We have no existing record of anyone attempting such a thing until as early as 2300 BC (possibly later) with a piece of literature called the Enuma Elish, a Babylonian creation myth. It was recorded on seven stone tablets (six of which have been recovered to date) and describes a story of creation involving a number of demigods fighting with each other, all trying to win the favour of the big god in charge, Marduk.
Not too terribly later from this writing was a poem from the Sumerian region called The Epic of Gilgamesh. This epic appears to have been written on twelve tablets, 8 of which have been recovered. It tells a remarkably different story about creation around the life and times of a king named Gilgamesh, who searches for the source of eternal life. Of interest, tablet eleven tells of a tale of the gods deciding to send a great flood, with Gilgamesh building a great boat to weather the storm.
Then, approximately 300-500 years after these two pieces of literature were written, a man named Moses led the Hebrew people through the Sinai desert for forty years. During this time, most Christians believe that he wrote the first five books of the Bible, including Genesis (where we get the story of God, Adam, Eve, and the serpent from). Again, a very different telling of the story, even though we find similarities through all three.
Some might say that Genesis used the earlier writings as inspiration for the Hebrew religion and the Bible but consider the more likely explanation that Genesis might actually be a response to bad storytelling. Remember, the story has predominantly been told orally for a couple thousand years before we find the Babylonian tablets. How disjointed has the story become in that period of time? Phone tag teaches us that the more people involved in passing a story along, the more disjointed the message will become.
So, why the history lesson? I wanted you to see how history has told a story and how in no time at all, a story can change in the hands of human storytellers.
But as Christians, we also believe in a divine Storyteller. With God as the true Author of what we read in the Bible, we must acknowledge that He is not going to leave the telling of His story to the hands of humans and let the chips fall where they may. He is going to INSPIRE human authors along the way to tell His story and (where appropriate) set the record straight.
I tell you all this to make a point about God. He is not interested in giving us all the answers to our questions. How old is the earth? How literal is Genesis? Why are there so many other conflicting stories? I don’t think there are concrete answers to these questions. And I believe that is because God is not in the business of providing all the answers to our questions.
Consider the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God told Adam, “Do not eat of the fruit of this tree, for if you do, you will surely die.” In other words, there is some knowledge about something called “good” and “evil” that God does not want Adam and Eve to have. And yet, there is no evidence that he plans to give them that knowledge Himself. In other words, on the matter of good and evil, God wants humanity ignorant. His divine plan is for them to NOT know something.
And Genesis is not a book with all the answers any more than The Epic of Gilgamesh or the Enuma Elish are. God is the source of all knowledge, and it always has been in limited supply. “Trust in the Lord and do not lean on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5).
Take comfort that the divine Author is telling us exactly what He wants to tell us, and in the matters where He withholds information, He desires us to trust Him in our uncertainty.