not true.
1. Augustine makes no argument at all that the text declares anything but a literal 6 days of creation
What the text does not say is " making all things at once, simultaneously" -- which was Augustine's belief.
A belief that cannot be wrenched into Gen 2:1-3 or Exodus 20:11 as it turns out.
Still - more obvious - Augustine was no Darwinist
Augustine:
“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 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.
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 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”.
2
2 - Augustine. The Literal Meaning of Genesis, translated by John Hammond Taylor (1982), Vol. 1, Book 4, Chapter 33, paragraph 51–52, p. 141, italics in the original. New York: Newman Press.
Augustine clearly
affirmed a real, or “literal” Adam. He also affirms the literal rather than symbolic view - in speaking of the early chapters of Genesis, Augustine writes:
“All these things stood for something other than what they were, but all the same they were themselves bodily entities. And when the narrator mentioned them he was not employing figurative language, but giving an explicit account of things which had a forward reference that was figurative.” (On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis VIII.4.8)
=== literal days of Genesis
“
What of the actual days of creation in Augustine’s thought? Augustine adopted a cautious attitude: “
What kind of days these were it is extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible for us to conceive, and how much more to say!”
He reads
Sirach 18:1 to teach that God creates everything all at once. Hence t
he puzzle: why does Genesis then portray creation as taking place over six days? Unlike some moderns, he is not trying to account for an older earth scenario,
nor is he trying to square Genesis with evolutionary scenarios. He has his own questions which interest him.”
“Augustine argues that “the
world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.”
City of God XI.6
I.e. instantaneous
=== literal years of Genesis and not even 6000 years of life on planet Earth
“It is important to realize that Augustine quite happily affirmed the importance, even
primacy, of the historical or literal sense of Scripture. And it was the literal sense of Scripture which he sought to understand—especially in his two commentaries on Genesis (do not miss the key word in his two Genesis commentaries—
literal).
.Augustine takes the
genealogies of Scriptures as factual, believes in the long lives of the pre-flood persons of the Old Testament, and
can even suggest how long man has been on the earth. Thus,
in City of God (12.11 [10]) Augustine can write: “
On the basis of Sacred Scripture, however, we calculate that
not even six thousand years have passed since the origin of mankind.”
