It is false to portray it as either young earth creationism or evolution. If you look at the Hebrew, the word used as ‘day’ carries symbolic meaning, and the same Hebrew word was used to identify ages, such as the span of a person’s life (say Jacob) being referred to as the day of Jacob. I see Genesis describing stages of the creation, not literal days, but longer periods of time that were dominated by one task.
BTW: the stages of the creation as described in Genesis map very nicely to what an observer on the surface of the earth would see in fast forward as the earth formed according to the current theories of science. When you take ‘day’ as symbolic, astrophysics CONFIRMS the sequence of events in Genesis.
Bad hermenuetic. EVERY time in the OT, when a number is used in conjunction with the word day, it refers to a 24 hour period. On top of that, God described "Evening and morning" as being a day. Taken together, it is obvious that the intention is a 24 hour day. It was NEVER suggested to mean anything different, until people started trying to compromise scripture with the false assumptions of evolution.Consider:
And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day
And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.
And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day
and so on...
BTW: the stages of the creation as described in Genesis map very nicely to what an observer on the surface of the earth would see in fast forward as the earth formed according to the current theories of science.
If one reads the sequence recorded in Genesis 1, the scripture has the sequence of events completely opposite the evolution sequence. Scripture has Earth before sun & stars, water before land, light before the sun, plants before the sun, birds before land animals.
Finally, if it is symbolic, then the earth had vegetation aons before the Sun was created. The two theories are completely incompatable!!!