Too long & complex to go into here, but there is an essay in the collection Tolkien the Medievalist - 'Augustine in the Cottage of Lost Play: The Ainulindale as asterisk cosmogony' by John William Houghton, which shows that Ainulindale is not in contradiction to Genesis:
Quote:
Given Augustine's reading of Genesis, then, the asterisk-cosmogony of the Ainulindale would fit alongside the other cosmoginies known to the early medieval west - an asterisk Bede or Aelfric, stumbling across Eriol/Aelfwine's report, would have been able to assimiilate it to the scriptural account. To the degree that Tolkien's myth strikes its real reader as different from Genesis, it represents a particularly ironic twist on the philologically inspired creative process Shippey finds in Tolkien: not only can he imagine things for which we easily find a place in the primary world, he can also imagine things that fit in ways we would not expect.
...What is of interest, however, beyond the neat fit of this literary myth into the real history of Western thought, is the symetry of opposed motives between Augustine's reading of Genesis & Tolkien's asterisked account of the creation. Each man lives in a time that sees Genesis under attack from contemporary science:in Augustines day, teh story of creation seemed to contradict the stoic & neoplatonist philosophers' picture of the world; in Tolkien's, as in our own, physical science & literary criticism seeemed to converge in an attack on the myths of Western religion, in particular on the stories of creation in Genesis.
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In short, Houghton shows that Ainulindale can be interpreted so as to fit with no contradictions into a Christian understanding of creation. Certainly, if all we had was The Silmarillion - the whole Sil, including works like the Athrabeth, we would very possibly end up with a kind of amalgam of Judaism & Christianity - ie, the monotheism, with out the complex rituals, but with a kind of messianic belief in the coming of a saviour. How 'Pagan' it would be is another question, & whether it would produce Crusades, Inquisitions, witch burnings, bombing of abortion clinics & all the rest, is a question of whether you believe that those things were/are religiously inspired, or just down to the way human beings are.