Genesis 1:6-14

I've always wondered about the science of the Bible, and why it often seems at odds with the world we observe today. I've never really read the Bible critically to consider where it confuses me. The whole concept of building the world in six days seems like a literary device. There is a quote from 2 Peter that says "With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day." Perhaps Genesis begins with a good example of this.

That is not to say that I think each "day" lasted exactly 1,000 years, although I know some people believe that. I just think this is a storyteller using literary license.

To me, the big problem with the story of creation is not the 6 days. It isn't even that God made light, and divided it into night and day several days before He made the Sun and the Moon to light the day and the night. My larger confusion comes from the firmament. Beginning in chapter 1, verse 6, the Bible says

"(6) And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. (7) And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. (8) And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. (9) And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. ... (14) And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: (15) And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. (16) And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

What does this mean? I read it to mean that there were waters surrounding the earth, and that God made Heavens -- which consists of the stars, the moon and the Sun -- to divide the water above the Earth from the water upon the Earth. This means that Heaven is in the sky, and that there is, or was, a massive body of water hovering just on the other side of the stars. We now know that the area that contains the stars is mind-numbingly massive. The firmament, therefore, is tremendously large, and the floodgates are on the other side of it. Oddly, we also know that the firmament is not very firm. It is mostly a vast vacuum, occupied, irregularly, by gaseous and rocky bodies drifting throught the vacuum.

This passage sounds more than a little bit like a child trying to describe clouds, rain and the night sky by looking at them and guessing what they are made of and how they came into being, with no clue as to whether they are correct. However, this is supposed to be the Word of God. If it is the Word of God, why isn't is both entirely accurate and sufficiently complete to allow the ancient Israelites to develop a correct understanding of the space beyond Earth's atmosphere?

If I accept that this is just a story, symbolic, simplistic and scientifically inaccurate, this does not bode well for my blind acceptance of any other biblical stories.