I can only give you my view, Steve. I purport to speak for no-one except myself.

Almost every word in the question puts you into the same position of the people who wrote Genesis. "He". A bit anthropomorphic don't you feel? Aren't you straight into God and man in the same image before we have got more than a word into the thing? "Created" Our best understanding of time is that it did not exist until after the Big Bang. So a word like "created" which embeds time within it doesn't really work. Remember, I do not put science and religion into opposition as you do, so I have no more difficulty ( than anyone else!) having the idea of time starting but we are inheritly limited by language which does not have that concept.

'Did he or didn't he?" Are you sure there's no excluded middle? Maybe he both did and didn't depending on how you think about it. Did a gardener grow that flower, or did the flower grow itself? Yes and no, both and neither in isolation.

A lot of people think science is about what actually IS in the world. In my view, that's not so. Science is about building models that describe the world to a greater or lesser extent, but it is about models, not actuality. So people say, to take an example, that the earth goes round the sun. We are all taught that. But as a good scientist you know that is only a simple model and our best understanding of what actually occurs is far more complicated. And it is not that the earth going round the sun is the simplest model: it is for some problems but not for others. For many real world problems it is a much better model to have the sun going round the earth. Hence why even the most scientific pedant in the world will still talk about sunrise and sunset.

All of that may seem a diversion. It isn't. We use models to help us understand and encapsulate ideas and concepts and to enable us to make decisions and predictions. I see Genesis and similar accounts of creation (Ash and Elder anyone?) as similar to the models. Are they literally true? Not in my mind. Do they contain truths? Yes. Did God create the world? I find that a useful model for some things. Does that mean I don't accept the Big Bang as our current best scientic model? Of course I accept it.