I don't have time to respond to everything right now, but I'll get started.

First of all, there's a difference between a "lie" and something that roughly resembles the situation I put forward. But I come down along the same lines as well named here. How do I know that poker advice is good or bad? There's a form of external verification.

And while I might "question" his poker advice in the absence of some form of verification, that doesn't make the poker advice automatically wrong or bad.

The thing about the story of the boy who cried wolf is that he REPEATEDLY cried wolf to the point that nobody paid attention to him. Your position is dramatically different because you've created an all-or-nothing dichotomy.

Edit: To clarify, you've taken a position that if someone is wrong once that you should never trust them about anything.

This is an interesting one, because you have now pre-defined that the Bible must FIRST be interpreted literally unless otherwise noted. Why is that the base assumption and not that the Bible is primarily a book that conveys accurate theology, and not necessarily a book of literal history?

I'm sorry I don't have a ton of time to reply to this thread either. I might not should have posted and created so many questions, not having time to come back and try to answer better.

In short I would ask this. If the Bible conveys accurate theology but not literal history, then how can you trust the theology if you can't trust the history?

If someone says the history can be proven false or inaccurate (which I don't personally accept) then why would that person accept the theology of the Bible as accurate? There is no way to "prove" the theology, so it would seem to me that would be the harder part for someone to believe anyway.

My views are not unique or anything special. I hold to the same conservative view of the Bible that the rest of the Reformed church does.

At the end of the day I can't help but think about Mark 8:29 when Jesus said: "And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ.” " That is the most important question. If He is not the incarnate son of God, the Christ, then the rest of the Bible really doesn't matter at all.

Why should I view it as history?

History and theology are two different things. Here's an example. If I have a friend relating an emotional account with me, I can accept that my friend is being entirely accurate in his perception of events while simultaneously believing that his perception of events is not entirely accurate.

I'm aware of this. But that doesn't make your position any more believable or reasonable.

If the rest of the Bible really doesn't matter at all, why does it matter that you read it as a literal history?

Edit: This last line is one of my primary disappointments with Reformed Theology. There's so much about trying to be right that hard lines are taken in ways and places where it seems to make no sense. And then when you push on it, you get responses that basically negate the hard lines that were taken in the first place, which makes me wonder why those hard lines were drawn to begin with.

The accounts of the Greek Gods are pretty detailed. But the Greeks didn't believe in their Gods in the literal sense that you are reading the Bible with.

Why should documents written thousands of years apart in entirely different cultures be read in exactly the same way?

This isn't just dead religions either, Shinto is still practiced by millions of Japanese people, but few of them think that the legends of local kami or of the founding of Japan, etc. are literally true.

We have many ways of coming to know what is true. I don't think we need to assume that there is just one.

The universe seems to point towards the idea that the Genesis account is not literal. That seems to be a big clue.

Therefore, it seems reasonable to interpret it as a parable. What do I actually lose by doing that?

If you are unwilling to parse between history and theology, then there's not much room for you to make sense of it. But the rest of the world can and does parse between history and theology, and to us it's not a problem.

Jesus' claims about himself are theological in nature. Given that these claims are central to Christianity, it seems important to either accept them or reject them as a theological basis. But you don't have a similar type of theological linchpin on the creation account.