Hate to break it to you but the earth is a couple billion years old. Understanding recognizing with the abilities God has given us the actual age of the earth in no way detracts from the knowledge that it was He who created it. I don't understand how He created it as it is beyond my ken, as well as yours. However I seriously doubt God would want us to forgo all common sense just to accept an actual number that can be found nowhere in the Bible.
Word! Claiming the earth is only a few thousand years old denies reality. But more importantly, it attempts to bring God down to human level. God does NOT work on our timescale, He’s infinitely grander than that and His Work and Plans are way beyond our understanding. I wish that people would take note that often the greatest scientists (Newton, Einstein, Galileo) were quite devout. One can’t look at the grandeur of the Cosmos and not be moved spiritually. Well, Carl Sagan, maybe, but I think even he was; he just denied the feeling to himself.
Well said. Even if one accepts the 6,000 (?) age of the Earth as doctrine, that does not contradict the Earth being a couple billion years old. Here are two alternatives just off the top of my head:
(1) God's year (and day for that matter) is as long as he says it is. Nothing says that His time frame is the same as ours. In fact, an omnipotent God could exist in any time frame He wanted, associated with ours only to the degree and in the way He desires. This even has biblical support: Light (i.e., the Sun) wasn't created until the third day, so the first two days clearly were measured by something other than a day as seen by the Sun rising and setting.
(2) (My personal favorite) God created the world 6,000 years ago, but He created it old. Kind of like writing a backstory to a novel. Again, no problem at all for an omnipotent God.
The most likely reality is that the Earth was created several billion years ago. Those who transcribed the bible probably could not even come close to conceiving of a billion years, so the message was put in terms they could grasp.