Not only were the stories likely oral, but it's important to note that the Bible wasn't written in English in the original, or any modern language, including modern Hebrew.

I'd wager that connotations of words have changed. We read the literal "first day", but perhaps word day had other meaning that made perfect sense when it was written, such as a connotation of "period of time".

Read that way the Bible's view of the world creation does make more sense for a world being prepared for life.

Light, Water, Dividing the Land and Water and adding plant life, sun, stars and moon (I take this as clearing the sky so you could see the sun, stars, and moon.), animal life, and human life.

It's not a bad theory for origination thousands of years ago. Not sure that it matches perfectly the accepted geological chronology but in a general way it's not horrific.

Finally I don't think God intended the Book of Genesis as a detailed set of instructions for how to create a world. So why would it include all of the detail or interplay. Perhaps he was saying for human life to be possible this is what needed to be done, and here are the general epochs in which it was achieved.

For me at least the message of the creation story isn't a practical lesson in geology, but that God took care of what was needed for humans to survive. It has meaning in an allegorical way on how to build a good life by first building your proper foundation. Brian

I think a middle ground would be better. The pay should be low though, like maybe the average pay for an American. Then they might want to make conditions that raise the average American

Somewhere I've seen a study that correlated corruption in a state government to the amount it's representatives, so the higher the pay, the higher the corruption. Of course I have no idea how they quantified the corruption in the given state's governments.