Dear Chas:

Sorry for the delay  in responding.

The only reason we know anything about God and His salvation plan is because He has revealed it to us through those to whom God revealed it to, such as to Abraham, Moses, the prophets, the Apostles, and the Church.

The stories of pre-history (Genesis) were revealed to the human race by God, to whom we do not know. Those stories were passed down from generation to generation as Oral History until such time that Oral History was written down.

The passing down the oral history is not like the telegraph game that is played in high school. The telegraph game is when a particular message or story is told in the ear of the student next to you. Then that person passes it on to the next student and so on. By the time story gets to the end of the line it is not the same story that began the exercise.  That game is a good illustration of how gossip and rumor develops between persons to persons, but it does not illustrate how Oral History works.

In cultures that extensively use oral history, both in ancient times and in modern times,  the stories told are passed on from generation to generation very accurately.  In order to help remember the stories embellishments and myth are added. This would be similar to the docudrama movies of today.

The creation story in Genesis was passed down by oral tradition, generation after generation, until the time the writer of Genesis wrote down the stories. The style of writing in Genesis is mythological. Myth does not mean fiction. It is, rather, a form of writing that includes both literal facts and history surrounded by mythological narrative.

This means that when the Bible says that God created the world in six days it does not automatically mean a literal six days of 24 hours. God simply willed creation and it came into existence. The six day arrangement for creation was a way that the writer  of Genesis sought to impress the Jewish people with the holiness of the Sabbath.  It was also a way to show that God is a God of order, not chaos. It was an orderly way to present the religious truth of who is our Creator, not how He created the universe.

The Navarre Bible commentary states:

The kind of history found in the Pentateuch is of a very special kind: it is a history of which the most important element is not that it allows the reader to check whether events took place in this way or in some other way: what matters is that he can identify the teaching that the book is trying to get across.

The Bible is a book of religion, not science, nor geography, nor history.  The Bible contains all of that, but it is not a textbook of science, geography, or history. The infallibility of the Bible is in its religious message. With that said, when archaeologists  make their discoveries of cities or people in the time of the Bible, it is almost always  accurate to the biblical narrative. But, such archaeological or anthropological  or historical accuracy is subservient and trivial to the primary purpose of the Bible which is God's message to us about Himself and about how we are to live our lives in his friendship. The Bible presents us with God's salvation history.

It does not matter if God created the world in six days or he used the processes of evolution over billions of years to create what we see on this earth.  There is no such thing as time to God. God stands in the eternal present. He could have created the Grand Canyon in a way that it only looked like it was millions of years old. Or, he could have allowed the natural processes of His creation to carve out the Grand Canyon over millions of year. Either either way it glorifies God. Either way it does not matter.

What matters is the religious message. We can marvel and be bolstered in our Faith whenever science proves something that matches the Biblical record, but it matters not if that ever happens because such things are not the point and purpose of the Bible.

When science suggests, for example, that the parting of the Red Sea was a result of a massive volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean that caused the sea level to drop sufficiently to create a land bridge for Moses and his people to cross, there is no challenge to our Faith or to the Biblical narrative. If this scientific theory is true it simply means that God used the nature that He created to facilitate the escape route for Moses. It is still a miracle, a miracle of timing that Moses was there right at the time that the volcano erupted and caused the sea level to drop to allow Moses and his people to cross the Red Sea. Praise God. This enhances my Faith that God can arrange such "divine appointments."

So, in teaching the Bible we can marvel when science proves some Biblical detail, but the focus we need to learn is the religious message God wants us to have. In that religious message there is no error. The infallible Word of God in Sacred Scripture and Sacred Oral Tradition, interpreted by God's Magisterium can be relied upon and found a sure mooring of our Faith.

God Bless,
Bro. Ignatius Mary