As severe winter temperatures plague much of the USA, this brings to mind the popular twist on Jesus’ teaching: “Many are cold but few are frozen.”
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If you mean the contemporary people of the Americas and Oceania, no. Genesis wasn’t written for them and the author(s) didn’t know that those people existed (in any specific sense.)
Why is that relevant? The New Testament speaks of the Old Testament being relevant to Jews and Gentiles in times thereafter. It never claims that the Tanakh was known or intended for peoples contemporary to the original authors in distant places.
Many have made the same complaints about quantum physics. Do you dismiss quantum physics?
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You can’t touch God. You can’t see God, You can’t smell God. You can’t taste God.
Why would faith be important to someone who cannot see, hear, touch, taste, etc?
ETA: Faith is important to us. 
I mean the millions of people living outside of the Babylon region 500 BC.
I agree with you on this: the Book of Genesis was not written for the reading of those outside of the Ancient Near East of 500 B.C.
Genesis is a story that the priestly writers of the Hebrew people of Babylon wrote to describe that they had only one God who chose them as God’s chosen people. It was a fiction they came up with to describe what their God did for them. It was the origination of monotheism. A revolutionary idea at the time.
That is one view of Genesis. It has many detractors. There are many short-comings of that “origination of monotheism” speculation. Among them is the fact that someone wishing to promote monotheism probably wouldn’t use so many different names for God! One would also be unlikely to use PLURAL forms for the deity. Indeed, even in the first two chapters of Genesis one sees ELOHIM (a PLURAL form, --IM ending, not a singular one: ELO’AH), and "Let us make man in our own image), as well as YHWH.
That’s only the beginning of the many problems with your “origination of monotheism” idea. It also illustrates the many problems of casually accepting the pop-level “skeptic’s” propaganda as good scholarship. (In some ways, these types of “Bible skeptic” websites are very similar to what Ken Ham and AIG do from the other end of the spectrum.) At best, it is just one side of Ancient Near Eastern languages and cultures dialogue.
Yes, if the “priestly writers” in Babylon were trying to retroactively introduce a monotheism into their ancient history, they appear to have done a very poor job of it. Why did they confuse their message?
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The biological world isn’t intended to be understood. It just is. No one is taking issue with the process of constantly re-evaluating conclusions based on the latest data, we’re questioning whether this process should be necessary for something like the word of God, which presumably would be intended to be highly intelligible.
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Not only did they use plural (ELOHIM) they also mentioned several gods besides YHWH (why is that translated to LORD by the way) by name.
And it appears that, by the time they wrote Exodus, Jews were monolatrous people rather than monotheistic.
Yes, if you can’t detect something in any tangible way, all you have left is faith. My question is (as I think you already know) why this is God’s desired state of affairs. Why not make himself undeniably tangible? Why not speak with a booming voice from the heavens every Sunday while spontaneously healing everyone’s severed limbs, for example?
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Good.
That presumption (of being intended to be highly intelligible) is quite rational. It is also quite rational to consider the scriptures “highly intelligible”. That is not in contradiction to the scriptures being understood better and better as the years go by and more data becomes available.
How do you know that? If the biological world is part of a creation which is the work of a Creator, it certainly could be intended to be better and better understood over time.
Apparently they were not in fact inspired.
I agree, but I would then expect that the majority would be readily apparent, with interesting minutia that could require further study (otherwise people might get bored with it, after all). In reality we see that even after 2 millennia of study, there are very deep disagreements about some pretty fundamental points. Creation vs evolution being but one of them.
Sure, it could be, but even if that’s the case, presumably the Bible would be intended to be a little more up-front, not requiring centuries of research to grasp.
The biological world can have no “intent” per se. You are right that is just “is.” But it can neither intend nor not intend to be understood. If you suggest that it cannot be understood, then that would be your opinion, not a fact. Another would suggest (and many do here) that the biological world is utterly comprehensible.
With the gospel message, one can say that he rejects it or accepts it. One can say that he agrees or disagrees. I do not believe that one can say that he does not understand it. It is very simple. Faith is a choice to accept forgiveness. One can legitimately say that he does not understand why God chose this method, but not that he does not understand (as in comprehend.)
Careful. You can’t see, smell, or taste oxygen either, yet we don’t believe in oxygen by faith. One only needs faith to believe in something that can’t be detected by any means.
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I can, but it will be opinion, as one cannot really quantify this kind of thing.
Yes, that’s why he used the passive voice: “is not intended” rather than “does not intend”.
Nobody has suggested such a thing.
Then why is there so much argument among Christians over what that message is?
I’m certainly not suggesting that the biological world can’t be understood - I’m a biologist! It’s literally my job to try and understand it! I don’t think it’s difficult to see how the biological world is more tangible than the meaning of a piece of literature. I can make objective measurements about the physical world, but I can’t objectively ascertain the meaning of a particular passage of scripture.
There is very little (EDIT:) DISagreement over the meaning or significance of the Gospel message itself. This was the subject being discussed. There is much disagreement over the granular significance of certain scriptures, but the reason for and way to salvation is very clear and mostly agreed upon.
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Of course, I wasn’t expecting anything other than your opinion. I was asking you to explain why you disagree.