I am, among other things, a scientist and I believe the universe was created in 6 literal days, starting with “light.” I am not at all embarrassed by saying that.
Too many people have given up literal belief in God’s word because of the flimsiest of pseudo-science.
They are afraid they will appear backward, so they punish themselves, the opposite of Galileo’s persecution!
More people should read Gerald Schroeder. He can give them some clarity, leading to courage and a realization that science does not rule out anything important in God’s word, but in fact often supports it.
A leap of faith is still needed in this life, but it is not the naive leap the fearful think it is. Faith is both less and more than their unexamined and casual assumptions about it.
We actually have one planet (Venus) in our system which is ballpark for some sort of a 5K - 10K year age, and Venus LOOKS it: 900-degrees F surface temperature, 90-bar CO2 atmosphere, massive thermal imbalance, massive upwars IR flux, total lack of regolith etc. Since Earth and Mars do not look like that at all, you have to assume they aree substantially older than that, but not hundreds of millions or billions of years old.
However, David points out in Ps. that a 1,000 yrs is like a day for God which indicates to me that from God's perspective time is entirely different. Also, Moses differentiates in Duet 32:7 between "the days of old" and "the years of many generations".
I have no doubt that God created everything. I think it's our understanding of what a day is that causes us to miss some of the deeper messages.
As a scientist do you see order arise from chaos in an unguided system?