Ancient Creation Accounts Were Functional, not Material

John Walton argues in The Lost World of Genesis One that rather than concerning material creation, the creation account in Genesis one concerns functional creation, because that is how ancient readers, to whom modern scientific understandings of the world would be entirely alien, would have understood it. He proposes an “expanded interpretive translation” of Genesis 1:1,

In the initial period, God created by assigning functions throughout the heavens and the earth, and this is how he did it.

The rest of Genesis 1 spells out what happened in this…