Its snap your finger time again. :<))))
I completely disagree on the age issue. Scripture does not define length of day. It does not say day/month and year of when the Creation took place. Etc, etc, etc.
The Earth is simply not “young” by any stretch of the imagination.
“For the Christian, the question of the age of the creation can only be answered on the basis of Scripture.”
I don’t think it’s answered at all in scripture. Time as we know it is directly tied to the speed of light. We look at it as a constant... roughly one foot per nanosecond, But there is a lot of evidence that in the beginning it was much faster. So if time is not linear, and we don’t know what the bounds are, we are not in a position to measure it from the beginning.
Science to the rescue. The universe is expanding nearly at the speed of light. It may seem impossible, but the first six days - as measured from the scientific source of the Big Bang, is actually equal to the 16 million years as we measure it on earth. (see http://aish.com/societywork/sciencenature/Age_of_the_Universe.asp for the math).
The general relationship between time near the beginning and time today is a million million. (This has been validated by the WMAP satellite.) That’s a 1 with 12 zeros after it. If you multiply this by 6 days, then divide by 365 days per year, then you get the 15 million years old that science uses for the age of the earth.
So it all really depend upon where God was when he measured those first six days. As measured from the center of creation, these six “earth” days really represent the same time as the 16 million years as measured on earth as claimed by science. So you see, science and the Bible really CAN agree. The Bible makes it clear that God is on earth at the end of the sixth day when man is created, but until then . . . we really do not know.
Really? Everyone who follows the commentary of either Blessed Augustine or St. Gregory of Nyssa on Genesis doubts that, which means a goodly body of Christians from at least the fourth century, when both saw clearly that a simple face-value reading of the first two chapters of Genesis was incoherent, the down to the present. Hardly "few people".
The Church's ancient tradition of considering all of human history as taking place in the seventh day, and calling the Kingdom which is to come, "the Eighth and Eternal Day", suggests that the reading of the time scales in Genesis as being somewhat amorphous is actually the normative Christian position, not the literalist position on which "young earth" creationism relies. Even St. Basil the Great whose Hexameron is sometimes adduced as a support for literalism among the Fathers of the Church, though he comments on the days of creation as if they were literal days, early in the book, wrote "it matters not whether you say 'day' or 'aeon', the thought is the same."
What Scripture actually teaches may be very different from what the reading of Scripture through a crabbed and constricted hermeneutic tradition that is built on the self-conscious rejection of the Latin version of Holy Tradition, ignorance of Orthodox Holy Tradition, and self-conscious rejection of modernity will glean from Scripture.
It must not be a subject God thinks is very important for us to know from reading the Bible ... since the Bible says nothing about the age of the earth. This is phony issue by some misguided people. It really doesn't matter how old the earth is.
While it may be true scripture may have been created 4000 B.C. it took man 13.8 billion years to read and write.
The Bible was written by man at a time when most people were illiterate. Most knew nothing of the town a few miles away...how could they possibly understand 100 years, much less a billion years? I believe the Bible was written for the simple man of the times, in such a way that he could understand. Saying that man could not have evolved from lower forms of life puts limitations on God. God has no limitations. He created EVERY thing. How he did it does not matter.