Originally Posted by Oneironaut
How far are you willing to take this analogy? If a "day" is really a billion years long, and this is what the Bible is describing, you would have the history of the earth looking something like this:
7,000,000,000-6,000,000,000 years ago: the "heaven", the earth and light come into existence
6,000,000,000-5,000,000,000 years ago: "Heaven" is invented (a different one from the first one, apparently)
5,000,000,000-4,000,000,000 years ago: the first landmasses are formed, as well as plants
4,000,000,000-3,000,000,000 years ago: the stars, the Sun and the Moon are invented
3,000,000,000-2,000,000,000 years ago: birds and water animals come into existence
2,000,000,000-1,000,000,000 years ago: land animals come into existence, including humans
1,000,000,000 years ago-now: God rests
Now obviously that's not how things actually happened. Plants could not have possibly existed for a billion years before the Sun existed, for example. Birds evolved from land animals, and the whale, which was supposedly created with the other water animals, also evolved from land animals. The first stars are much older than the Earth. All elements heavier than hydrogen and helium come from stars. That's how they got here. It's ridiculous to state that the Earth, almost exclusively made out of such heavier elements, was the only thing in the universe for the first 3 billion years of existence.
How is it that they could screw up the actual history of the planet so much yet get the date right (only they accidentally wrote thousand where they meant billion)? Did humans keep time for billions of years? Did they keep a calendar system for billions of years and yet not carve anything about it into any rocks anywhere that we've been able to find? Why is it that they maintained a low-tech society for 7 billion years and only in the past 10,000 years developed civilization? Or have there been previous civilizations that didn't leave any archaeological evidence whatsoever? If you're going to state that the human race is as old as the Earth and the Earth is 7,000,000,000 years old, you have a lot of explaining to do to explain why the historical record doesn't make this obvious to us.
Where do you get this information? You admit that you don't give the Bible much credit, yet you're using it to determine the date of the universe over known science? And then you're trying to state that the Bible got the dates wrong. That's gotta be the weirdest form of Creationism I've ever heard of. And you're not even trying to make it fit into how old we know the Earth is. How do you know the Earth is 6 million or 6 billion years old? Again, I think you're just making stuff up.
Scientifically? Where's the science here? You're just making guesses without substantiating them. That's not science. The earth is obviously more than 6,000 years old, but there's no evidence to suggest it's 6 million or 6 billion years old. Why is the Bible any more correct than any other culture's creation myth regarding this? Lots of different cultures have lots of different dates for the age of the planet, you know. And I bet you could come up with theories about how they "accidentally misinterpreted" the real date that they had spent so much effort into recording as the eons went by. Think about it. You're proposing that people kept track of how much time passed for 6 million or 6 billion years, without a trace of such a calendar system surviving, except for one date in an ancient book which was written wrong for some reason. Why didn't they say "The universe is 6,025,687 years old" or something like that? If they were able to keep track of how old the universe was so accurately for so many years, why did they suddenly screw it up at the last minute?
So? That doesn't mean we just need to throw out what we know whenever somebody else comes up with an alternative hypothesis. We need to base our beliefs on facts and only change them when facts show that our original explanation is no longer the most plausible. When somebody comes up with a wacky idea that runs in the face of common sense and provides no evidence to back it up, it's safe to ignore it for better substantiated theories.
Nothing can be proven 100%. But we can get close. And the fields of geology and cosmology have determined the age of the planet and the universe to a much more accurate extent than a layman making guesses based on an ancient text he hasn't even read.
