I appreciate Ted Davis’ blog post. I believe that we sometimes forget that Jesus, like any other “person”, is not required to be literally scientifically correct if he is not espousing on science. He is entitled to speak with all figures of speech often which, taken literally, are not scientifically, mathematically or even historically correct. He is not prohibited from using hyperbole which by its very definition is never literally true. So blindly taking Jesus “literally and simply” (or rather, when it’s convenient) is to literally tell Jesus that unlike every other speaker, every sentence he utters must hold up under miscroscopic parsing independent of the context and intent.
Even in modern peer-reviewed scientific literature (let alone everyday non-scientific speech) you can find figures of speech that are literally not true scientifically, but the readers, assumed to be intelligent (and the most neglected biblical hermeneutic is that the bible is meant to be read intelligently) do not conclude that this makes liars of the writers. It is not hard to find sentences in physics literature such as “at this point the electron knows to do X” where “knows to” summarizes the fact that the detailed scientific explanation of the electron doing X is not the point of the present discussion, and it would only obfuscate the main point to litter the text with verbiage just to make the sentence scientifically air tight. Nobody speaks that way, and Jesus isn’t required to.
Jesus is not talking about science or the details of the creation in Mark 10:6. He is saying nothing more than “ever since there were men and women, they were meant to bond together in marriage.”
When you look at the AiG “exegesis” of this passage, it is painful to read how they contort to allow the beginning of creation to refer to the end of the six days. It amounts to the computational trick of a slop “fudge factor” that they grant to Jesus of exactly six days.