That essay I found on Biblical Literalism also includes an absolutely awesome section on what the real thinking behind the Book of Genesis was. It wasn’t about evolution vs. creationism. It wasn’t even as much about cosmology. What it was about was establishing the supremacy of a monotheistic god over formerly polytheistic and animistic powers.

Read through the eyes of the people who wrote it, Genesis 1 would seem very different from the way most people today would tend to read it — including both evolutionists who may dismiss it as a prescientific account of origins, and creationists who may try to defend it as the true science and literal history of origins. For most peoples in the ancient world the various regions of nature were divine. Sun, moon and stars were gods. There were sky gods and earth gods and water gods. There were gods of light and darkness, rivers and vegetation, animals and fertility. […]

Each day of creation [in Genesis 1] takes on two principal categories of divinity in the pantheons of the day, and declares that these are not gods at all, but creatures — creations of the one true God who is the only one, without a second or third. Each day dismisses an additional cluster of deities, arranged in a cosmological and symmetrical order.

On the first day the gods of light and darkness are dismissed. On the second day, the gods of sky and sea. On the third day, earth gods and gods of vegetation. On the fourth day, sun, moon and star gods. The fifth and sixth days take away any associations with divinity from the animal kingdom. And finally human existence, too, is emptied of any intrinsic divinity […]

WHOO! That is some good stuff. I love when religious thinking is presented so clearly and eloquently. What a wonderful rarity.