Are Creation Stories literal or metaphorical?

Answer 1

Certainly metaphorical; most make claims that are either implicitly or directly contradicted by evidence, and no person of the cultures that spawned them knew of how lightning happened, let alone understood the mechanisms of stellar and planetary formation, nor of of the Big Bang.

Answer 2

Many of the people who believed in them took them literally. The Torah's creation-narrative (Genesis ch.1) has, traditionally, always been understood literally.

A summary of this Creation-narrative is that, day by day, God created the universe and everything in it (Genesis ch.1).God created the universe out of nothing (Exodus 20:11, Isaiah 40:28; Rashi commentary to Genesis 1:14; Maimonides' "Guide," 2:30). Note that the Torah, in describing the Creation, deliberately employs brevity and ellipsis, just as it does in many other topics. See the Talmud, Hagigah 11b.

On day 1: God created the universe in general, light, and this Earth. The light was not the same as that of the sun. Rather, it was light that God created before the sun, and which emanated from a point in space without any physical source; like what we might term a "white hole."

On day 2: God created the separation between the Earth and the upper atmosphere.

On day 3: God separated the continents from the oceans, and created plants.

On day 4: God created the sun, moon, and stars.

On day 5: God created birds and fish.

On day 6: God created animals and people.

On day 7: God ceased creating, thereby creating the concept of rest.

See also:

Is there evidence for Creation?

Can you show that God exists?

Seeing God's wisdom

Answer 3

The Genesis creation stories can hardly be literal accounts. Leon R. Kass explains in The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, that the second creation story (Genesis 2:4b-25) departs from the first (Genesis 1:1-2:4a)not only in content but also in tone, mood and orientation, although pious readers, believing that the text cannot contain contradictions, ignore the major disjunctions between the two creation stories and tend to treat the second story as the fuller, more detailed account of the creation of man that the first story simply reported. He says we can learn most from the story of Adam and Eve by regarding it as a mythical yet realistic portrait of permanent truths about our humanity, rather than as a historical yet idealised portrait of a blissful existence we once enjoyed but lost.