These ideas dominate his beliefs concerning creation in the modern view.
Edwards holds many of the traditional ideas about the meanings of the creation stories in the Bible. Like many others he believes that the second story actually predates the first and is considered the Yahweh source, while the first story is the priestly source and stresses the dignity of human beings, made in God's image. After this explanation he states, "The salvific truths have revelatory significance for Christian theology today, but the historical order of events and cosmology of the ancient world do not- (Edwards, 10). Here he restates his central idea about what he believes the creation stories have become. The salvific truths that he talks about are the knowledge that we should gain from the stories. It is ideas that we need in order to fully understand God. One of the most important of these is the idea that we are created in God's image and likeness. This is important because it tells us that we reflect everything that God stands for and he would not harm something that is created to be like himself. Some of the other salvific truths that Edwards believes that you should take from the creation stories is, "The preexistence and transcendence of God over all creatures, the ongoing relationships of all things to God as creatures to their Creator, God's delight in creature, the divine proclamations of the goodness of creation, the blessing that makes creation fecund, the call of humans being to work with creation but also to take care of it as God would, the social nature of the human person,"" as well as many others (Edwards, 12). Edwards thinks that these ideas should be the focus of you reading of the creation stories. He says in these stories, "Religious meaning is not attached to historical order in which things occur, but to the theological insights that the narrative encapsulates- (Edwards, 11).