Another Step (or half step?)

Class
We are philosophically  aligned!  The new-members class at the church described the formal rules of the arm church that we are looking to join as "Liberal".  This apparently means (in this case) that women are treated equally, and that people are welcomed to participate without stringent membership rules.  I guess that the only down-side is that they may let riffraff like yours truly in the door.


Learning: Line of  Inquiry #1 - the Nature of God.
Learning is different than being taught.  I'm planning to learn. (how's that for a wishy-washy commitment?).  Part of the active learning investment has been to do some reading, starting with "The Science of God" by Schroeder. I'm just part of the way through, but it has started some interesting trains of thought.

One fundamental assertion of the book is that Science and Genesis are aligned, with respect to describing the first 15 billion years of the universe.  The presentation is logical, even if I am not sufficiently schooled in either cosmology or religion to be able to fact-check all of the components of the argument.  One of the questions that this part of the book initially left me with (as it might any heathen) was,  why is this so important that they align?  So what if our understanding and representation of either cosmology or Genesis is incorrect?  As we learn more they should get closer and that should be enough.

The "aha" is as follows.  This is important because the Bible is the word of God, and as such cannot be wrong.  If the Bible contradicts observations of the real world, then we must resolve the contradiction.  That of course sends me into another line of inquiry - "how was Genesis written?" How did the authors (I know - I have a lot to learn) know what to write, without the knowledge imparted by the scientific community of the 21st century? Did the authors share an understanding with Schroeder of the time dilation aspect of the first 7 days that is asserted by Schroeder, or was it a matter of simply transcribing  the word of God?  What did they transcribe it from?  Also, what motivated the choice of  7 (logarithmically time-dilated) days as the model?  Why not just use vague sorts of "long time" language.  It looks like I need to understand the complete history of the bible, once I have completed aligning the Bible with my pro-science predisposition.

There is so much to learn :D