Creationists generally fit into the fundamentalist wing of evangelical Christianity, viewing the Bible as God's perfect, inerrant, timeless Word and so to be read as literal, historical and scientific fact wherever possible. Wherever the Bible's account of origins appears to differ from that of modern science, science must therefore give way. They argue that God is perfectly capable of saying plainly what he means, and he knows far better than modern scientists what happened at the beginning.
Finally they believe that the whole Bible stands or falls as a unit, so if you question the historicity of Genesis 1-2 you also by implication query the historicity of the gospels.
Inspiration and inerrancy
It's probably no surprise that I disagree with this view of Scripture at almost all points. I do accept that the Bible is divinely inspired ('God-breathed', 2 Tim 3:16) but I have a very different understanding from the Creationists of how that operates and what that means. For a start, I do not believe that divine inspiration must imply 'inerrancy' as they understand it, still less complete historical or scientific accuracy at all points. In my view this is to fall into the same Modernist-paradigm trap as Dawkins that there is only one kind of truth and knowing which is the Factual, ultimately the Scientific. This is certainly not how the original Hebrew authors would have approached Truth, nor does it in fact provide the best or fullest description of Reality. Scientific and historical truth are both important, but truth can also be personal, relational, philosophical, paradoxical, poetic, symbolic or mythopoeic.
To read Genesis 1-2 as teaching history and science is, I believe, to do serious violence to the texts, to the type of literature, its cultural context, and the intentions and understandings of the original authors. Gen 1 is essentially a poetic polemic for monotheism in a polytheistic cultural context, and Gen 2 can best be read as a mythological and theological account of the origins of evil, sin, pain and death. This does not mean that it contains no history, still less that it is untrue - indeed, it makes it more deeply and timelessly true.
The Gospels and Genesis
But if you believe this, how can you say whether any of the Bible is historically true? Most importantly, what of the Gospels, the accounts of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Christ? If these events were not historical, then the entire basis of our Christian faith is gone (1 Corinthians 15:14). But in the Gospels we have a very different kind of writing and literature to the early chapters of Genesis. The gospel writers, particularly in the Synoptics and Luke most of all, are explicitly setting out to record eyewitness accounts of events that took place within their own lifetimes, whose actuality or otherwise would in most cases be fairly easily disprovable were it not true. Here we have the beginnings of recognisable modern historical writing - theologically-interpreted history to be sure, but history nonetheless. C.S. Lewis wrote that, to a scholar of mythology, the resurrection accounts bore none of the hallmarks of myth but stood out very clearly as historical accounts. The Garden of Eden, by contrast, with its talking snake and Trees of Life and of the Knowledge of Good and Evil - quite clearly not standard horticultural varieties - bears all the marks of a mythological-symbolic story of origins, written primarily to convey theological rather than historical truths.
Can God not speak plainly?
Finally, let's deal with the point of whether God is incapable of speaking plainly. Of course he's capable, but that does not mean he always chooses to - look at Jesus' many parables and highly symbolical sayings. And sometimes plain factual statement is not actually the best way to convey what you are trying to say - particularly if you are conveying spiritual truths which are beyond the capabilities of normal human language and experience.
Can a leopard change its spots?
Of course, I need to always be open to the possibility that I may be wrong about all this. I sometimes wonder what it would take to make a dyed-in-the-wool Creationist or Evolutionist change their views - so much has often been invested emotionally in their position that to change would almost be a religious conversion (to a Creationist it would probably feel like apostasy, and might even involve a loss of faith). And I also wonder if Creationists and Evolutionists have such fundamentally, structurally incompatible worldviews that it's often not even possible for them to speak comprehensibly to each other.
Nonetheless, I fervently wish that Christians didn't have to divide and fight over this issue, one on which I believe no-one's salvation need depend. I also wish that in their legitimate concerns over some of the implications of evolution, Creationists did not have to set themselves up - and Christianity by implication - as such easy targets for scornful atheists.
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