Read Genesis 1 the way you would read a startup log. Do not ask whether it is true yet. Ask only what order the steps come in.
The log
Line one. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The earth is without form and void. The address space exists, and nothing is in it.
Day one. “Let there be light.” Light arrives three days before any source of light. Ancient critics found this odd. If you have worked with graphics, you may not: you set up illumination before you place any lamps.
Day two. A firmament divides the waters above from the waters below. A partition goes up before anything gets stored in it.
Day three. Dry land appears, then plants, “the herb yielding seed.” The plants are the first thing that reproduces by rule. Set the conditions and it generates itself.
Day four. Sun, moon and stars, placed “for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.” Time gets a scheduler, after light already exists.
Days five and six. Fish, birds, animals. The world gets populated.
Then comes the strangest line in the file. Until now every command has been an impersonal “let there be.” Suddenly the speaker changes register: “Let us make man in our image.” The system gets a user who resembles the developer.
Day seven. No more commands. The process keeps running by itself.
Why the order is interesting
Notice the structure underneath. Days one to three create the spaces: light and dark, sky and sea, land. Days four to six fill them, in the same order: lights for day and night, birds and fish for sky and sea, animals and people for land. Scholars noticed this long before computers. The chapter is highly composed. Its author cared about sequence the way an engineer cares about dependency order.
Each thing is also declared and then checked. “And God saw that it was good.” Run, inspect, continue.
What to do with this
The better scholarly reading of Genesis 1 sees a temple being set up, with God finally taking up residence on the seventh day. Another reads it as a calm reply to Babylonian myths where the world is built from a dead goddess. Both are worth your time.
But a text can be more than one thing. For three thousand years, readers have looked at this chapter and seen the kind of thought that their own age did best. Philosophers saw philosophy in it, and astronomers saw astronomy. We happen to be the people who write boot sequences.
The next question is what “rested on the seventh day” means in this reading. We think it means that the thing was built to run.