The story's point is that God is "so" obviously God that He snaps His fingers and in a short week has an entire universe. Find me ANY hint in this story of sitting around drumming His fingers waiting millions of years for "let there be light" to finally finish baking in the oven. It ain't there.
Actually, the idea that God takes tens of billions of years to accomplish paints a particularly unusual type of God....in fact, no "God" at all.
More a putterer or a tinkerer type of God....A MIRACLE MAX of "The Princess Bride!"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A scientist was performing an experiment on the verbal reactions of fleas. He had trained a flea to jump on command. The scientist would command the flea, "Jump flea!" and the flea would jump. Then the scientist would proceed to pull off one of the fleas legs with a pair of tweezers and write a comment in his notebook.
The scientist did this many times until the flea had only one leg left. The scientist commanded, "Jump flea!" and the flea made its best effort to jump, which the scientist recorded in his notebook.
After he pulled off its last leg, the scientist again commanded the flea to jump, and after repeating the command many times without the flea responding he jotted down in his notebook, "After the flea loses all of its legs it becomes completely deaf."
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And I believe that the only reason it took God a full six days (144 hours) to accomplish his purpose was because he meant it to be a lesson on the Sabbath and making a day of rest and reflection (which lesson is clearly taught in Exodus Chapter 20).
If he had not purposed to use the creation events as a lesson to man, he would have done it instantly (as Augustine believed). I think Augustine may have missed the Sabbatical lesson and that is why he insisted that it did not take 6 days, as this would have implied that God actually NEEDED time to complete his work. He didn't. But he obviously took the time anyway.
"Yes, my stats do hold because there isn't any hint of vast periods of time in this story"
Actually I have noted some very clear and obvious hints of long periods, which have ignored.
"Actually, the idea that God takes tens of billions of years to accomplish paints a particularly unusual type of God....in fact, no "God" at all."
Or maybe God is smarter than you think. Instead of producing a world in seven days, he did it in a way that would impress time-bound humans by showing over millions of years the care and interconnected constants and systems that were ultimatley necessary just for man to exist. If a man produced a piece of fine furniture in 7 days we would think it junk and unthought. Part of the problem with the 7-day theory is it fails to take into account God's nature.