I would have to say to that Christian that (s)he is dumb and doesn't know what they are talking about. People wanted FACTS when it came to what foods were safe or not, not cute allegorical stories. People wanted FACTS about how fast and mean the large, predatory animals around were, not cutesy stories about how nice it was when it ate your face off.

I think that Christian was just projecting onto people thousands of years too dead to respond, since obviously (s)he doesn't really care to much for the facts or else they wouldn't be a Christian.

If you get a chance, ask that person if people back then cared enough about those pesky facts to teach their children the FACT of poisonous materials or predatory animals in their area. I think that Christian will change their tune, probably along the lines of "but those are day to day things, those facts are good... but not the questions that REALLY matter..." Ugh... silly fluff headed morons...

I would say people were concerned with having a story to explain the facts they had.  They had no way of finding out the rest of the facts.  Seriously, they didn't know about cells, didn't have microscopes to view pond scum.  Let alone understand genetics and DNA.  They didn't have a huge collection of fossils and those few they did find seemed utterly monstrous and fantastical.  Give the poor goat herders a break.  They didn't have any means to find out the relevant facts.

So they made up stories.  The ancient historians did as well.  They had never been to the ends of the earth, so they could make up stories about Amazons and such.  The ancient priests didn't know about biology or ecology or astronomy or cosmology or .... so they could make up their own stories to stroke the egos of the people who were supporting them.  Just like present day priests.

Have you heard about priests-pastors-rectors-reverends who continue on as spiritual leaders when they no longer believe in god/s/dess themselves?  I have.  It's a job.  And if your congregation no longer wants to put money in the collection plate on your worship day, you will have to get a real job.  So you cater to their egos.  "We are the chosen ones.  Our religion is better than their religion because we believe in the TRUTH and they are ignorant.  They need to be saved from themselves or (in some religions) destroyed."

The creation myths are way to explain what was then unexplainable, to provide some cohesiveness to the group and to keep the priest's standard of living up.

                I totally agree with B166ER & cj but I'll try to briefer.   Without Cds, Tvs, movies, strip joints etc......... the only entertainment was the clan storytellers;  what northern Europeans would call Bards & poets,  what they said was entertainment but not considered factual by their contemporarys. Then one day (or two or three)  some SOB wrote it all down,  then edited several times at which point the decendent fools thought it was real. Ergo religion.

I think the writers of the narrative thought it was true, even the parts they themselves added to it. I say 'added to', since what was written was not by any means wholly original to the people who wrote those parts of the scriptures.

It was based very heavily on earlier myths, even if not entirely consciously so. The writers had almost certainly heard versions of those earlier ideas, so their own ideas were inevitably strongly influenced by them.

Non-science based, ie largely intuitive, thinking, which applies to most people, even today, tries to come up with an idea that 'feels' right, that seems to make most sense within the context of the understanding of the individual. The idea of some form of empirical testing either never occurred to them, even if they had some way of doing it, or was specifically rejected, as pure 'reason' was typically considered superior by the philosophically inclined. 

The whole point of the writing was to give people a narrative - the 'honest' statement "We don't know" was not going to be acceptable.

The same thing applied to all the texts - no-one knew the exact words of what Jesus or his followers said - what was written was what the writers judged as what they would have said. Same for detailed description of events.

So in a sense, I think the narratives were both 'made up' and honestly believed in.

There is no need to qualify it. All of Genesis is fiction as are the rest of the Septuagint stories regardless of having been translated into an artificial liturgical language called Hebrew even though written using Aramaic script. A long sentence but I hope it addresses the major misconceptions.

As to the time period, we have no evidence the story existed prior to the 1st c. BC although it can be construed to have been created in the previous century. So it is not a matter of people not being concerned with the facts. The story is a god story. It is not particularly different from other creation stories and without the pious translations and interpolations the sections you mention are lifted from Amun of Egypt -- who is Yahweh, ram's horns and all.

As to not caring about facts, it was created as entertaining fiction as were all the other god stories. Facts are of interest in none of them. It does not differ from the others in this respect. The stories in the Septuagint, aka Old Testament, are just so stories explaining rituals and taboos and are not considered to be more than that in Judaism. In Christianity give a man a gospel and he will come up with six different ways to baptize and a dozen ways to do bread and wine. For Judaism it is the reverse the story can be understood any number of ways but the rituals and taboos must remain unchanged. That is why in the last century in the more backward parts of Eastern Europe Jews were killed by other Jews for the strange ritual of a Bar Mitzvah as it derives from one of the gospels.

Any narrative that survived for such time periods would have to have a strong mnemonic aspect, regardless of whatever was consciously written into it.