Definitely an interesting questions. But then, if He were all powerful, and could inspire and preserve a book for 3500 years, could he not tell us what he did? I prefer to believe that an omnipotent God could, and DID, tell us exactly what happened, and in what time frame. If he is truly omnipotent, he could do it in 6 days, just like he said. Luther struggled with the same thing, except he wondered why God took 6 days, and not do it all instantaneously.
It just doens’t make any sense to me, not in terms of what science shows, not in terms of God’s personality and nature either.
On what basis do you determine God's personality? If it is the Bible, then you are picking and choosing elements of His personality to identify. Genesis and Exodus say 6 days, so I prefer to believe He did it that way.
One interesting thing I learned. God "created" in 6 days, and is now "preserving". I decided, since I believe the scripture is inspired and inerrant, and should be taken literally whenever the context allows, that it would be impossible to understand how He "created" when all we can do is observe whats occurs while he is "preserving".
In summary, we don't know. We try to explain the cosmos around us by what we observe in the present, and induce extrapolation, conjecture, and theory to explain it. Man's theories will always be flawed because we can only observe the presnt from our perspective on earth. To assert something is an certain age past 6000 years is past man's recorded history, and is based on a series of assumptions and conjectures I am not willing to accept. OE vs YE is not provable, one just has to determine which set of assumptions and postulates they are willing to accept.
That said, the real question to be answered is this: Did God raise Jesus from the dead? The answer to that will begin to color the answers the the questions proposed in this thread. To create a universe in 6 days is NOTHING compared to loving the pinacle of your creation so much that you become one of them, live among them, let them kill you, resurrect yourself, and then offer them forgiveness. That is a real miracle, and the basis of all of my other beliefs. If Jesus be not raised, my faith is worthless!!! Science conclusively proves that once the human body has been dead for 3 days, it cannot come back to life.
So you are unwilling to accept the well-supported assumptions of science in favor of the completely unsupported beliefs of religion?