[SaveUS]

"older but certainly much less old than billions of years, mind you."

So how old? How old would you say your typical dinosaur would be? I know that is a huge range, but would you say a couple of thousand years old? A million? A billion?
And what author was responsible for writing Genesis? Mind you, it had to be carved in stone (that is a lot of carving) if it was much older than 0-BC. So that would have made a stack of rocks that would fill a room at least. Then, they had to wait for someone to invent paper and a quill pen so they could rewrite the whole thing. And still my question, Does the bible accept incest as acceptable behavior? If not, how did we get here with White people, Black people, Chinese People, and a bunch of other people in just a few thousand years? And, what need was there in zapping a gazillion stars out there at distances like 200 million light years away? Just decoration? This just brings up more questions than it answers. I now know why you prefer "Poof" theory.

[bvw]

You imagine many things, but I haven't specfied to how long. The theory of time dilation at relativistic speeds gives one an out -- creation could be six days on a eight day mantle clock or it could be billions -- billions, yet for an observer moving at speeds approaching c, those billions can be days, or seconds. Nor does such an observer have to be far away, either. And that's just one scientifically plausible approach -- there are others. Nor do I exempt or exclude from consideration a universe 5000 or so years old, measured in our everyday experience of time -- that YEC is a possibility -- a possibility that strains greatly against current understandings of how to interpret geological data, decay dating, and tree and coral rings -- but still, worthy of consideration.

Why? Becuase that is the time period given in a legal document of the most careful and continual keeping.