What is a myth?
We call the opening chapters of Genesis myths quite rightly, because we cannot regard them as literal history, and it can be argued that they were never intended to be seen as such. This is the first step we must make so as to understand them better. The problem arises because they were included in a book called the Bible, and many Christians thought that this meant they were inerrant. Actually the Bible is a collection of many types of writing: genealogies, court chronicles (with the inevitable spin such things have), poetry, proverbs, prophetic utterances and visions, biography, history, and letters. Each type needs to be read in the context of what type it is. Poetry is bound to have imagery, for instance. A myth can be a 'true' myth, in the sense that its meaning is true. And these Genesis myths were a communication given in terms of the potential understanding of those who would first read them. Our task is to interpret them in the light of all the other communications from the same source. A myth is a story with a meaning; it is the meaning we must attempt to fathom out.
In recent times we have begun to discover how old the universe is, how old the planet we live on is, how long ago there is evidence of the first beings we might call human, and how much evidence there is that life on earth has evolved. We bring all this knowledge with us, and must not discard it, or - worse - create a false dichotomy between religion and science. Both should be seen as the means of enlightening the other.
The myths of Genesis are no less a source of truth because they talk of creation in six 'days', and if you do lots of sums on the genealogies in Genesis you can arrive at a ridiculous date for creation as 4004 B.C., as famously Bishop Ussher did in the seventeenth century. This was a mistake on several levels. The genealogies of the Bible are not necessarily complete, and the word translated 'day' in Genesis chapter 1 can just as easily be translated as age, epoch, or era.