Just for your (and anyone else's) information: I always seek the Holy Spirit in the interpretation of the Word of God. My initial understanding of Scripture comes from a reading of the text and prayer alone. I may turn to other sources after I have read the text and prayed, but I will never let a human writing contradict what God's Word says on its own.
When I was 5 or 6, I read Genesis for the first time. To me, it was obviously poetic speech. Keep in mind that at that age, no one had tried to teach me about evolution. I had no reason to think the world was any particular age. I was being raised in a fundamentalist church and a fundamentalist family, taught that Scripture was the Word of God (which I still believe). I started by praying to God, thanking Him for giving me the ability to read, and picked up the book and read. It was obvious to me that that God wrote Genesis 1 as a story: a beautiful story, but it was as obviously fiction as Jesus' parables were. That's just how it was.
In the four decades since then, I have read (and written) countless scholarly works on Biblical interpretation. Some of them affirmed that first reading on my own, and some contradicted it. If I read something written by man that challenges my own understanding, I go back to the text. I pray, and I read. And if God opens my mind, sometimes I do see multiple interpretations. (Sometime a single verse can have 3, 4, or 5 TRUE interpretations, all of which are exactly what God intends to say.) And sometimes I get a clear answer of, "No, this is not what God is saying. This contradicts what you know about God." And sometimes I don't get a clear answer one way or another, so I study and pray some more. That's how it works.
If you tell me that your understanding of Genesis is absolutely spirit-led, I will submit and say we just have different understandings. God is not the author of confusion, so I don't know why God would say one thing to one person and something else to another, but I do know that God is infinitely good and does not lie, so I hold on to that and move on.
However, I have to wonder how many people who hold this "literal, non-poetic" interpretation of Genesis really read it that way with an open mind, and how many people were indoctrinated to say it was literal before they ever read it. I do not mean to offend, but from where I'm sitting, it so looks like a bunch of people are looking at the sky and calling it green. I sit here saying, "Uh, no, it's blue," and they just insist that it's green. The only way I can make sense of it is to figure somewhere along the line someone taught them wrong. I have no other way to wrap my mind around it.
I don't know if this makes sense to any of you. But it is so frustrating for me, seeing people call the sky green and the grass pink.
