Actually, the Bible is allegorical. And the record establishes conclusively that the earth is very old.
“That story could only be told by one Person. (note the capital “P”.)”
Regarding the capital “P”, I have occasionally wondered how German writers express the same reverence when using nouns that refer to God, since all nouns are capitalized in German. Can you shed some light on that?
Of course. Thanks for asking. Reverence is expressed in English because we don’t capitalize every noun. Germans do so with the language itself. “Denn also hat Gott die Welt geliebt...”
There is some level of age that will be expressed in any miracle. As Marlowe points out, Jesus created a vintage wine out of water. Vintage wine, as we know, requires time.
Necessarily the earth had to have soil, and soil is the result of a process. Therefore, there’s some level of age that would have been apparent. Likewise, a fully made human would bypass birth, infancy, adolescence, etc. There would be an apparent age.
Sedimentary layers, however, would be a different subject.
For those areas I rely on the thoughts of my sister, Alamo-girl, and her understanding of a few things things, to include: (1) That Eden was outside of time, and (2) that the point of the big bang, due to relativity and the speed of light, has a different place on the scale of time than does the earth. Time would pass far more on the earth, part of the rapidly expanding universe.