Try St Augustine, 1600 years ago, who said that Genesis is written the way it is as a condescension to our limited understanding.
That's the same St Augustine called "the doctor of grace" and "the first Protestant," BTW.
Yes, it’s dumbed down.
Yes, the “finite cannot grasp the infinite” was a notion Calvin taught, perhaps as an echo of Augustine.
Macro-evolutionary biology is not a necessary inference from this idea.
51. But if the angelic mind can grasp simultaneously all that the sacred text sets down separately in an ordered arrangement according to causal connection, were not all these things also made simultaneously, the firmament itself, the waters gathered together and the bare land that appeared, the plants and trees that sprang forth, the lights and stars that were established, the living creatures in the water and on the earth? Or were they rather created at different times on appointed days?As anyone can see from the above quote, Augustine's "accommodation theory" is grounded in the idea that God spoke of days because we would not be able to comprehend the instant formation of everything all at once with built-in principles of orderly growth and development for each species. As for the actual age of the earth, he's one of us backwoods types, a true young earther. From his City of God, Book 12:
Perhaps we ought not to think of these creatures at the moment they were produced as subject to the processes of nature which we now observe in them, but rather as under the wonderful and unutterable power of the Wisdom of God, which reaches from end to end mightily and governs all graciously.[66] For this power of Divine Wisdom does not reach by stages or arrive by steps. It was just as easy, then, for God to create everything as it is for Wisdom to exercise this mighty power. For through Wisdom all things were made, and the motion we now see in creatures, measured by the lapse of time, as each one fulfills its proper function, comes to creatures from those causal reasons[67] implanted in them, which God scattered as seeds at the moment of creation when He spoke and they were made, He commanded and they were created.[68]
52. Creation, therefore, did not take place slowly in order that a slow development might be implanted in those things that are slow by nature; nor were the ages established at the plodding pace at which they now pass. Time brings about the development of these creatures according to the laws of their numbers, but there was no passage of time when they received these laws at creation. Otherwise, if we think that, when they were first created by the Word of God, there were the processes of nature with the normal duration of days that we know, those creatures that shoot forth roots and clothe the earth would need not one day but many to germinate beneath the ground, and then a certain number of days, according to their natures, to come forth from the ground; and the creation of vegetation, which Scripture places on one day, namely the third, would have been a gradual process.
And then how many days were necessary for birds to fly, if they proceeded from the earliest stages through the periods of natural growth to the sprouting of feathers and wings? Or perhaps were eggs only created, when on the fifth day, according to the scriptural narrative, the waters brought forth every winged bird according to its kind? If this can be maintained on the ground that in the liquid substance of the eggs there already existed all that grows and develops in the required course of days, because there were already present the numerous reason-principles implanted in an incorporeal manner within corporeal creatures, why could not the same thing have been said before the appearance of eggs, when in the humid element these same reason-principles were produced, from which winged creatures might be born and develop in the time required for the growth of each species?
In this narrative of creation Holy Scripture has said of the Creator that He completed His works in six days; and elsewhere, without contradicting this, it has been written of the same Creator that He created all things together.[69] It follows, therefore, that He, who created all things together, simultaneously created these six days, or seven, or rather the one day six or seven times repeated. Why, then, was there any need for six distinct days to be set forth in the narrative one after the other? The reason is that those who cannot understand the meaning of the text, He created all things together, cannot arrive at the meaning of Scripture unless the narrative proceeds slowly step by step.
Available here: http://www.andrsib.com/ch/litgen.htm
Let us, then, omit the conjectures of men who know not what they say, when they speak of the nature and origin of the human race. For some hold the same opinion regarding men that they hold regarding the world itself, that they have always been. Thus Apuleius says when he is describing our race, Individually they are mortal, but collectively, and as a race, they are immortal. And when they are asked, how, if the human race has always been, they vindicate the truth of their history, which narrates who were the inventors, and what they invented, and who first instituted the liberal studies and the other arts, and who first inhabited this or that region, and this or that island? They reply, that most, if not all lands, were so desolated at intervals by fire and flood, that men were greatly reduced in numbers, and from these, again, the population was restored to its former numbers, and that thus there was at intervals a new beginning made, and though those things which had been interrupted and checked by the severe devastations were only renewed, yet they seemed to be originated then; but that man could not exist at all save as produced by man. But they say what they think, not what they know.
They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed. And, not to spend many words in exposing the baselessness of these documents, in which so many thousands of years are accounted for, nor in proving that their authorities are totally inadequate, let me cite only that letter which Alexander the Great wrote to his mother Olympias, giving her the narrative he had from an Egyptian priest, which he had extracted from their sacred archives, and which gave an account of kingdoms mentioned also by the Greek historians.
Available here: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120112.htm
So while we may be impressed with the idea of "accommodation" (I personally am not) as a way to reconcile the fleeting theories of mortal men with the eternally true revelation of God, it is an ill fit to use Augustine as a support for such compromise (a better term), when the whole of his argument was that God has sufficient power to perform creation of all things instantaneously, and does not need "stages" or "steps," but imbues His creations with internal laws, the same sort of laws that set boundaries on the Genesis kinds, but allow those same "kinds" to grow and thrive in the environment for which He created them.
As for Augustine being a proto-Protestant? Sure, why not. Much of what he has written would be welcome in many a Baptist pulpit (or Presbyterian, Reformed, Lutheran, etc). Not everything, to be sure. If he were alive today and a nearby neighbor, we'd invite him over to a one of our pot-luck picnics and have a friendly chat about some problem areas, but also rejoice in the many important things we held in common, not the least of which was his keen desire to harmonize his teaching on Genesis with Scripture, not with fad pseudo-science:
Whoever, then, does not accept the meaning that my limited powers have been able to discover or conjecture but seeks in the enumeration of the days of creation a different meaning, which might be understood not in prophetical or figurative sense, but literally and more aptly, in interpreting the works of creation, let him search and find a solution with God's help. I myself may possibly discover some other meaning more in harmony with the words of Scripture.Peace,
Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis 4.28.45, as quoted in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 32/4 (December 1989) p 464, available here: http://www.etsjets.org/files/JETS-PDFs/32/32-4/32-4-pp457-464_JETS.pdf
(BTW, interested readers are recommend to download rather than open the pdf directly, as it was hanging my browser until I just gave up and downloaded it. I'd have used a more direct citation, but couldn't find a complete copy of "Literal Meaning of Genesis" anywhere.)