The world and the Earth are two very different things. The world is the sphere of human existence—the here that we find ourselves in—and world is one of the oldest and most stable words in English.
Earth is also an ancient word, but it has had many meanings. The great Oxford English Dictionary says that "notions of the shape and position of the earth have so greatly changed since Old Teutonic times, while the language of the older notions has long outlived them, that it is very difficult to arrange the senses and applications of the word in any historical order." But today's common sense is the same as the scientist's sense: Earth is the body of rock on which we live, the stage on which takes place the drama of the world. Scientific ideas about the Earth also have changed over the course of science.
The world view
These two words, one solid as rock and the other a changeable chameleon, are keys to two different worldviews. The Biblical story of creation is meant to be taken as unchanging and eternal, outside time, based on the immutable words of God. Creation myths come from a pre-scientific mindset that sees the world as one big stage, and history as one long tale with us as the hero. I believe that this view is a refinement of our natural endowment as a species, stemming from our innate tendency to animate the landscape. You may believe as you wish, there being no scientific, objective approach to the matter.
In Genesis, the earth simply means one portion of the world—the material world of hills and streams, opposed to the material heavens of stars and clouds. The Hebrews didn't consider Earth to be a planet the way we think of planets. To them it was simply the living universe. Their story of the earth's creation was not a treatise in planetology.
The Earth view
But the universe has changed with the growth of our knowledge. Today the world is now just Earth, a particular planet, one of nine traveling around our sun and one of more than 100 planets detected around other suns. Planets today can be treated as a species, not as gods in the sky.
The history of planet Earth is no longer entangled with the tale of the human condition. Likewise, the study of geology is no longer at war with the study of justice, of good and evil, of right or of wrong. Those subjects are not affected by how trilobites evolved, how the dinosaurs died, or how the primate lineage gave rise to our unique and blessed species.
Creationists don't accept this situation—to them the Bible must be a guide not just to metaphysics, but to geophysics as well. The rest of us can move on to proper geoscience. Moreover, we can accept the obvious: that the Bible's words are not immutable but have been retranslated and reinterpreted since the day they were written down. As with the case of biology and evolution, the Bible no longer has any scientific weight in geology.
The story that geologists have deduced about Earth's birth rests inside the story that cosmologists have deduced about the universe. The evidence is well documented and the physical laws involved are as solid as we can tell. Speaking scientifically, the Earth appears exactly as it would if the geologist's story were true. But that story is not eternal and is subject to improvement.
Given that preamble, the real story of Earth's birth, even though it's only today's version, is as compelling in its own way as the rolling phrases of Genesis in King James's English.
