Science (observations in nature) - supports creation not evolution. So does the Bible

BobRyan said:

The Bible of course points to a 7 day creation week in Gen 2:1-3
And confirms the literal day timeline for that week in Ex 20:11 legal code.

It states that an infinite Creator, with unlimited capability, power, wisdom etc is the source, the cause of all life on Earth created in the same seven day time span that is the context for Exodus 20 and it's legal code.

James Barr points out that the Bible's record, historic account - was accepted as such when written and that the people at Sinai were not darwinists nor was the writer of Genesis and Exodus a Darwinist. Genesis was not an early exercise in "Teaching darwinism" and the scholars in OT studies and in Hebrew language - in all world class universities are pretty much in agreement on that point according to James Barr even though they don't actually believe that what the Bible is saying is accurate ... they at least admit to what it says.

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When you said that God "created" all life on Earth, what do you mean? According to the Genesis text you referenced, what does it mean for God to create something? Bring it into material existence (ex nihilo)?

DialecticSkeptic said:

When you said that God "created" all life on Earth, what do you mean? According to the Genesis text you referenced, what does it mean for God to create something? Bring it into material existence (ex nihilo)?

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I don't know what BobRyan means, but the concept that God created everything means everything. That includes spacetime itself and everything in it. If you mean how, I find it interesting that the account of creating Adam and Eve is very specific. That is really the problem between evolution and the bible.

What bothers me about evolution is that, by it's nature, it's based only on extrapolation. No one has witnessed one species evolve into another because human lifespan is not that long. We can witness adaptation and even mutation, but that's a long way from, say, observing a viable change in the number of chromosomes that is passed along to the next generation. Everything we see seems to increase the odds of evolution, and that's before we get to abiogenesis.

This is where such discussions tend to split to between viruses and random chance over several billion years. As an OEC, I have no problem with a universe and earth several billion years old. The problem with viruses is their ability to mix and match code, which means it's something very different from other life, and there's some debate whether viruses are alive at all. The problem with the random chance is that it assumes, by the existence of life, that the odds of abiogenesis and evolution are surmountable without producing any estimates on what the actual odds may be. There's questions on what the factors may be and the nuts and bolts of how it works and how abiogenesis could happen, so even the odds themselves are in question. It's essentially hand-waving the problem by saying "Well, we're here, aren't we?"

Tuur said:

What bothers me about evolution is that, by it's nature, it's based only on extrapolation. No one has witnessed one species evolve into another because human lifespan is not that long. We can witness adaptation and even mutation, but that's a long way from, say, observing a viable change in the number of chromosomes that is passed along to the next generation. Everything we see seems to increase the odds of evolution, and that's before we get to abiogenesis.

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It is like imagining a train full of immigrants and work crew pushing to West colonizing the great plains. You don't have their daily schedules or work routines but you know about when they left. You have a good idea who were there in the beginning.

Then years later you meet them at their destination where they have made a trade post, a train station, brothel, church, a bar and some houses. You chat with them and see how they are doing and who is left and who have been born since then and get an idea how the settlement is doing.

If you start backtracking their journey you can see broken stuff here and there along the route, few graves, probably some shot Indian villages and slaughtered buffalo remains, train tracks that might at places be buried under mudslides but you pick them up again as you continue. Similar stuff until you reach their starting point.

You have not actually witnessed their journey but by combining all the facts and clues along the journey you will have pretty accurate picture of what happened.

Then there is the option of just thinking they did not really ever start the journey, that there was no train, that nobody died during the journey, no Indians were killed despite the evidence.

That the settlers one day simple appeared where you met them and all the evidence is simply a ruse or that the journey can not be verified because you do not know what Mary had for lunch during day 543 or when you could not see those tracks under the mud for few miles.

Which option seems more probable ?

Homeowner said:

It is like imagining a train full of immigrants and work crew pushing to West colonizing the great plains. You don't have their daily schedules or work routines but you know about when they left. You have a good idea who were there in the beginning.

Then years later you meet them at their destination where they have made a trade post, a train station, brothel, church, a bar and some houses. You chat with them and see how they are doing and who is left and who have been born since then and get an idea how the settlement is doing.

If you start backtracking their journey you can see broken stuff here and there along the route, few graves, probably some shot Indian villages and slaughtered buffalo remains, train tracks that might at places be buried under mudslides but you pick them up again as you continue. Similar stuff until you reach their starting point.

You have not actually witnessed their journey but by combining all the facts and clues along the journey you will have pretty accurate picture of what happened.

Then there is the option of just thinking they did not really ever start the journey, that there was no train, that nobody died during the journey, no Indians were killed despite the evidence.

That the settlers one day simple appeared where you met them and all the evidence is simply a ruse or that the journey can not be verified because you do not know what Mary had for lunch during day 543 or when you could not see those tracks under the mud for few miles.

Which option seems more probable ?

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On the other hand, if the owner of a railroad says "I built this railroad," you have no reason to think it spontaneously appeared by random chance.

The problem with your analogy (and handwaving in general), is that the existence of a thing does not validate a theory of how the thing got there. There's been at least one astrologer who's drawn up a horoscope for the Apollo 13 flight and claimed that it showed why the mission nearly ended in disaster. That a tank ruptured in flight does not validate the claim.

If you wish to say that neither evolution or creation is verifiable, that would be correct. Except with creation, we have the word of the One who said. "I made that."

Tuur said:

What bothers me about evolution is that, by it's nature, it's based only on extrapolation.

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It explains and predicts a very wide range of observations. That's what scientific theories do and that's what it's nearly universally accepted by the relevant scientists.

Tuur said:

No one has witnessed one species evolve into another because human lifespan is not that long.

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Actually, we have. Plants sometimes speciate in a single generation and that's been observed. Rapid speciation in animals is less common but it's also been observed. More importantly, we see species in every step along the way to full speciation: nearly homogenous single species, species with modest genetic differences between populations, species consisting of distinct subspecies that can still interbreed freely, and every degree of imperfect interbreeding, up to pairs of species that are obviously closely related but no longer interbreed. What other explanation is on offer to explain these phenomena? What other explanation is there for clusters of closely related species, like the Galapagos finches or the honeycreepers of Hawaii?

Tuur said:

but that's a long way from, say, observing a viable change in the number of chromosomes that is passed along to the next generation

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We do see changes in chromosome number (e.g. chromosome fusion) that can be passed on, and we also see a number of species in which the number of chromosomes varies between individuals in the species.

More broadly, why do we see the treelike structure of species, reflected both in their morphology and in their DNA? Why do differences between species look exactly like the result of accumulated mutation? Why are genetically similar species found near one another? Why do new species in the fossil record always look like modifications of earlier species, at least where we have any kind of decent record?

Evolution answers these questions and far more, in detail and repeatedly. No one else has ever offered an alternative explanation for the same observations. Until someone does, scientists will keep accepting evolution as an explanation.

Tuur said:

On the other hand, if the owner of a railroad says "I built this railroad," you have no reason to think it spontaneously appeared by random chance.

The problem with your analogy (and handwaving in general), is that the existence of a thing does not validate a theory of how the thing got there. There's been at least one astrologer who's drawn up a horoscope for the Apollo 13 flight and claimed that it showed why the mission nearly ended in disaster. That a tank ruptured in flight does not validate the claim.

If you wish to say that neither evolution or creation is verifiable, that would be correct. Except with creation, we have the word of the One who said. "I made that."

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Expect on this analogy there would not actually be anyone saying they made the raildroad apart from the colonists. At best you would find a note on bar table from someone claiming he had made the railroad instead of colonists. Would that be any more probable ?

Homeowner said:

Expect on this analogy there would not actually be anyone saying they made the raildroad apart from the colonists. At best you would find a note on bar table from someone claiming he had made the railroad instead of colonists. Would that be any more probable ?

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So when God said He created all things, you're inclined not to believe Him?

Tuur said:

So when God said He created all things, you're inclined not to believe Him?

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Even the Pope does not have anything against evolution. The Bible is not a science book. Every piece of evidence we have from multiple fields of science points to old earth and evolution. Absolutely nothing points to creation as taken from literal reading of the Bible.

Let's say it actually happened exactly like it was written. What would be the point of making every piece of physical evidence we can find to indicate otherwise ?

sfs said:

It explains and predicts a very wide range of observations. That's what scientific theories do and that's what it's nearly universally accepted by the relevant scientists.

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Explain, yes. Predict, not so much. Without knowing the result beforehand, in the Jurassic could you predict a world heavily populated by mammals.

sfs said:

Plants sometimes speciate in a single generation and that's been observed.

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Not speciate. Hybridization isn't speciation. Plants of the family curcubita will not become members of zea mays. They won't even cross. Even mutations remain in the same species. Plant growers sometime practice chromosome cracking to try to get new varieties within a given species.

sfs said:

Why do new species in the fossil record always look like modifications of earlier species, at least where we have any kind of decent record?

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You included a disclaimer in the statement. Basically, you've argued that if a fossil looks similar, it's a modification of a species, but if it doesn't, that doesn't mean anything.

Recently, paleontologists have discovered a duck-like dinosaur in China. I don't think anyone's claiming that the ancestor of modern ducks.

sfs said:

Evolution answers these questions and far more, in detail and repeatedly.

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Unfortunately, so did the theories of humors and four elements and the astrology as practiced in Medieval medicine. It explained it, but it didn't make that explanation correct.

BobRyan said:

The Bible of course points to a 7 day creation week in Gen 2:1-3
And confirms the literal day timeline for that week in Ex 20:11 legal code.

It states that an infinite Creator, with unlimited capability, power, wisdom etc is the source, the cause of all life on Earth created in the same seven day time span that is the context for Exodus 20 and it's legal code.

James Barr points out that the Bible's record, historic account - was accepted as such when written and that the people at Sinai were not darwinists nor was the writer of Genesis and Exodus a Darwinist. Genesis was not an early exercise in "Teaching darwinism" and the scholars in OT studies and in Hebrew language - in all world class universities are pretty much in agreement on that point according to James Barr even though they don't actually believe that what the Bible is saying is accurate ... they at least admit to what it says.

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You're right! Genesis was actually an early exercise in Snow Dome World awareness ...

Tuur said:

Explain, yes. Predict, not so much.

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Both explain and predict. Not predict the future course of evolution, but predict new observations of, for example, comparative genetics. That's something it's done over and over (and over and over, literally millions of times).

Tuur said:

Not speciate.

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Yes, speciate. Polyploidization produces species in a single generation. Why make confident statements about a field you don't know well?

Tuur said:

Basically, you've argued that if a fossil looks similar, it's a modification of a species, but if it doesn't, that doesn't mean anything.

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Not at all. If we have a lot of fossils during a particular period and particular class of organism (as in, 'animals with skeletons), then we have a good record. That's true regardless of whether species look similar or not.

Tuur said:

Recently, paleontologists have discovered a duck-like dinosaur in China.

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No dinosaur actually resembles a duck. It might have a bill that looks vaguely similar, but no taxonomist (even those who predated Darwin) would have classified the two as similar.

Tuur said:

Unfortunately, so did the theories of humors and four elements and the astrology as practiced in Medieval medicine.

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Unfortunately, that's not remotely correct. Both theories were rejected precisely because they weren't useful for making predictions.

Your objections to evolution seem to be entirely based on things that turn out not to be true.

Let's be specific. Why isn't this evidence for common descent?

sfs said:

Both explain and predict. Not predict the future course of evolution, but predict new observations of, for example, comparative genetics. That's something it's done over and over (and over and over, literally millions of times).

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In other words, it can't really make a prediction. If it could, it would be more than generalities. The reason it cannot is that it's based on the premise of random change. Since it's random, it cannot make a real prediction. It can't even predict if an organism will evolve into a dead end or not, or why some organisms adapt and some do not. There's plenty of hand-waving, but not really nuts and bolts.

sfs said:

Yes, speciate. Polyploidization produces species in a single generation. Why make confident statements about a field you don't know well?

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An interesting statement, given that you don't know me from Adam's housecat. I notice you didn't pick up the bone I threw with cucurbita. The literally fun thing about cucurbita is that they readily cross. I could have mentioned apples and potato. Both are genetically unstable, which is why you propagate them from cuttings for apples and tubers for potatoes. Now: Is it your contention that a Red Delicious is a different species than a Granny Smith, or that a Russet is a different species from a Yukon Gold?

This gets into the question of what constitutes a different species, and some seem to have rather convenient definitions. Viable hybridized offspring is a good indicator of breeding within the same species, whereas non-viable offspring is a good indicator of breeding across species. Which brings us to cucurbita again, and m. domestica, and s. tuberosum, the first which readily crosses with other members of cucurbita and the latter two which are genetically unstable and yet remain the same species.

Strictly out of curiosity, have you done any farming? Any seed saving? Any sort of plant propagation? Played with hybridization? (yes, played: we had an old project with sunflowers for the kids when they were growing up). Tinkering with plants really is fun.

sfs said:

Unfortunately, that's not remotely correct. Both theories were rejected precisely because they weren't useful for making predictions.

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On the contrary, these theories chugged along for centuries because empirical observation was shoehorned into how they thought things worked. Had you asked a Medieval doctor why he prescribed a certain herb, he might have rattled off a theory based on humors and astrology or even the principle of similars. Today we know that more often than not they observed what worked and what didn't and then interpreted that through what they knew. But if you lived in 14th Century Europe, such was the theories of the day and such were applied to illness and treatment. I haven't come across the reasoning behind silver suture and using freshly ironed linins to bandage wounds; in the 21st Century we know that silver can have antimicrobial effects, and that freshly ironed linins would likely be cleaned than linins kept in a trunk, things that a 14th Century doctor wouldn't have known. And yet he would have likely argued that they were proof of the correctness of his theories, and ask why you would make confident statements about a field you didn't know well.

sfs said:

Let's be specific. Why isn't this evidence for common descent?

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Because a final result can be used to justify an incorrect theory. This is why I brought up an astrologer who cast a horoscope to prove Apollo 13 was fated to have a disaster. You have a theory based on observable adaptation that's extrapolated into speciation, but despite your claims about plants, without observed speciation. Given the random component, testability is difficult. The big question, abiogenesis, is unresolved, with different theories of how it would take place. A question of the odds of abiogenesis, much less the evolution from abiogenesis to multicelled organisms, doesn't appear to be seriously addressed, perhaps because so much hasn't been worked out.

Tuur said:

The big question, abiogenesis, is unresolved, with different theories of how it would take place. A question of the odds of abiogenesis, much less the evolution from abiogenesis to multicelled organisms, doesn't appear to be seriously addressed, perhaps because so much hasn't been worked out.

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Abiogenesis is indeed still largely unknown area. It is a separate field from evolution though.

Have you had time to think about yet that if God made everything like it is literally written in the Bible why did He create every piece of physical evidence we can find to point to conclusion that man evolved just like any other animal within their own branch in tree of life. The most successful of great apes.

Tuur said:

Because a final result can be used to justify an incorrect theory. This is why I brought up an astrologer who cast a horoscope to prove Apollo 13 was fated to have a disaster. You have a theory based on observable adaptation that's extrapolated into speciation, but despite your claims about plants, without observed speciation. Given the random component, testability is difficult. The big question, abiogenesis, is unresolved, with different theories of how it would take place. A question of the odds of abiogenesis, much less the evolution from abiogenesis to multicelled organisms, doesn't appear to be seriously addressed, perhaps because so much hasn't been worked out.

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Speciation is an observed fact. Even most creationist organizations now admit the fact. It is directly observed to happen. And of course, if God had just poofed life into existence, instead of making the Earth to bring forth living things, evolution would still work the same way. The evidence is consistent with creation and evolution. It's not consistent with the modern revision of scripture that is YE creationism.

Tuur said:

The concept that God created everything means everything. That includes spacetime itself and everything in it. If you mean how, I find it interesting that the account of creating Adam and Eve is very specific. That is really the problem between evolution and the Bible.

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I did not ask what God created, nor how he created, so this did not answer my question at all. I asked what the OP (or now you) meant by saying God created all life on Earth. "According to the Genesis text you referenced," I had asked, "what does it mean for God to create something? [Does it mean bringing] it into material existence (ex nihilo)?" And do pay attention to that clause, please ("according to the Genesis text"). I'm looking for an exegetical case to be made.

Tuur said:

What bothers me about evolution is that, by its nature, it's based only on extrapolation.

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There is a fairly easy solution to what bothers you: Develop an understanding of what (a) scientific theories generally and (b) the theory of evolution specifically are really about. I say that because you are bothered by a fabricated straw man that is typical of young-earth creationist sources. It is essentially a falsehood (i.e., does not correspond to reality). Those creationist sources typically represent evolution as a theory in search of observable evidence to support it (and pulling mental gymnastics to make that evidence fit). But this flips reality on its head—and quite literally, for we don't have a theory in search of observable evidence to support it, we have observable evidence in search of a theory to explain it.

The heliocentric theory of our solar system is a good example. We have these really strange but regular motions of celestial objects in the sky. How do we make sense of what we're seeing? That's the role of a theory. It makes sense of—and predicts—these planetary (i.e., "wandering") paths across our sky. It is "just a theory" but it explains the data so well that we can intercept planets with satellites and rovers, land scientific instruments on distant comets, and even calculate the location and orbit of tiny Kuiper belt objects several billion kilometers away with enough accuracy to perform a relatively close photographic fly-by (e.g., 486958 Arrokoth). Whatever the truth turns out to be, heliocentrism certainly approximates it more closely than any other theory ever has. It may be just a theory, but it's the best scientific explanation we have for all these observations that are true. We had observable evidence in need of an explanation. Whether or not the theory itself is true, the evidence it explains certainly is true.

The same thing applies to evolution. Whether or not it's true (which is a philosophical question), the theory is the best scientific explanation we have for all these things that are—the empirical facts of paleontology, population and developmental genetics, biogeography, molecular biology, paleoanthropology, and so on. These are the observations made of the real world. But how are we to understand and make sense of all these categorically different observations being made? That is the role of a scientific theory, a conceptual structure that provides a way of organizing, interpreting, and understanding the massive wealth of data we possess, drawing all the relevant facts together into a coherent scientific model that makes sense of them or explains them—an explanation so powerful that it makes predictions which result in new, previously unknown evidence being discovered (e.g., Tiktaalik)—which then adds to the credibility of the theory.

As is the case for all scientific enterprise, there is definitely some extrapolation involved. It is a significant error, though, to say that it's based "only" on extrapolation. That is a clear falsehood. (Since bearing false witness is a sin, it's just incredibly weird that Christians like Ken Ham and his ilk so willingly bear false witness about scientists and science educators. It definitely is weird, right?)

Tuur said:

No one has witnessed one species evolve into another because human lifespan is not that long.

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Actually, we have. Even young-earth creationist organizations had to admit as much (from Answers in Genesis to Creation Ministries International, from Kurt Wise to Carl Wieland). For example, see the article "Arguments We Think Creationists Should Not Use" at Creation Ministries International. Included in their list of arguments to never use is the one you just asserted.

Tuur said:

This is where such discussions tend to split to between viruses and random chance over several billion years. As an [old-earth creationist] ...

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Therein lies the distinction between us, then. We're a couple of old-earth creationists, but you reject evolution universal common ancestry from your view whereas I incorporate it.

Tuur said:

The problem with the random chance is that it assumes, by the existence of life, that the odds of abiogenesis and evolution are surmountable without producing any estimates on what the actual odds may be.

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Estimating the probability of life appearing on Earth might be intellectually stimulating but it's ultimately meaningless—because it happened. Let's say I roll some dice a couple of times and get a pair of sixes both times. What is the probability of that happening? It's something like one chance out of 1,296 tries, maybe—and yet I did it in a single attempt. It was highly improbable but it happened. What are the chances of a particular sperm fertilizing a specific egg? It's an improbability too high for my math skills to calculate, and yet here I am nevertheless. Same thing with life on Earth: Incredibly improbable, but nevertheless happened. So, how? That's the 64 million dollar scientific question.

Tuur said:

There are questions on what the factors may be and the nuts and bolts of how it works and how abiogenesis could happen, ...

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Yes, and those are scientific questions—and scientists are pursuing them, not hand-waving them. Abiogenesis research is cutting-edge stuff. I have some incredibly thick scientific books on the subject.

What about those on the creationist side? Are they proposing and developing research programs to explore and test questions about how life first appeared? No. They're the one's hand-waving the problem by saying, "God did it. Next question?" Show me a creationist answer which doesn't begin and end with accepting that God did it, where they do explore the natural means involved. (There isn't one.)

BobRyan said:

Science confirms that there is not one observation of dust,rocks,gas,sun-light producing a horse, or rabbit, or amoeba, or bacteria over time.

Science confirms that observations of over 80,000 generations of bacteria in the "long running evolution experiment" results in "more bacteria" - i.e. more prokaryotes - and not a single eukaryote. That's more generations of direct observation than supposedly it took for humans to evolve in the first place.

Science confirms that when something vastly complex in terms of machinery with encoding, decoding , manufacture, error-correction is detected it is a sign of intelligent design and manufacture and not merely a function of what we expect from dust,gas,rocks and sunlight "in sufficient quantities given enough time and chance".

The Bible says that it is infinite capability, infinite wisdom and power that is the "cause" the origin of that vastly complex machinery with encoding, decoding , manufacture, error-correction mechanism fully functional and autonomous.

To many rational minds this idea of the creator having more capability and intelligence than the thing created - makes sense and fits what we observe in real life.

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Amazing -- just about everything you said about science is wrong.

If that's going to be the theme of this thread, I'm out -- I was hoping for some rational discussion.

sfs said:

It explains and predicts a very wide range of observations. That's what scientific theories do and that's what it's nearly universally accepted by the relevant scientists.

Actually, we have. Plants sometimes speciate in a single generation and that's been observed. Rapid speciation in animals is less common but it's also been observed. More importantly, we see species in every step along the way to full speciation: nearly homogenous single species, species with modest genetic differences between populations, species consisting of distinct subspecies that can still interbreed freely, and every degree of imperfect interbreeding, up to pairs of species that are obviously closely related but no longer interbreed. What other explanation is on offer to explain these phenomena? What other explanation is there for clusters of closely related species, like the Galapagos finches or the honeycreepers of Hawaii?

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This reminds me of a paper we read in a 300-level botany course about how around craters in London after WWII ended new species of plants were found that no one had ever seen. They hypothesized that heat and pressure had altered the genetic material in seeds and a very few seeds survived this and sprouted. Some even propagated.
These days we could do a genetic analysis and decipher what species those seeds came from and determine what changed -- I wonder if anyone has revisited this.

sfs said:

We do see changes in chromosome number (e.g. chromosome fusion) that can be passed on, and we also see a number of species in which the number of chromosomes varies between individuals in the species.

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I have foxgloves in my flower beds. They started out all a deep purple, but as time went on new generations appeared with more a lavender color, with white spots amid the purple, and later all white, white with purple spots, and one that had golden flowers when it first matured but faded to white.

We guessed we might be seeing some mutations, and after conversing with a local botanist learned that we were right; these were all variations that occurred naturally, and while the solid colored flowers were just ordinary genetic variants the spotted one apparently came from a fairly common mutation.

A few years ago one grew that had double the blossoms of the rest, also a known mutation that breeders exploited to get foxgloves with flowers all around. We grew two dozen new plants from seeds gathered from that one, but not a single offspring carried that doubled blossom characteristic -- turned out it's usually due to an error that happens in the cell division leading to seeds and isn't unknown in nature, but that the one mutation that breeders exploited was heritable: the doubled amount of blossoms resulted from an extra sets of chromosomes, and the ones with even more came from having doubled chromosomes from those!

Fun stuff.

sfs said:

More broadly, why do we see the treelike structure of species, reflected both in their morphology and in their DNA? Why do differences between species look exactly like the result of accumulated mutation? Why are genetically similar species found near one another? Why do new species in the fossil record always look like modifications of earlier species, at least where we have any kind of decent record?

Evolution answers these questions and far more, in detail and repeatedly. No one else has ever offered an alternative explanation for the same observations. Until someone does, scientists will keep accepting evolution as an explanation.

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All this wonderful coordination and multiplication of creatures is what led several university students I knew who had been atheists or agnostics to conclude that there was a Designer behind the process. A mutual friend compared it to a computer programmer who wrote about forty lines of code and set it to running, and that code re-wrote itself every now and then, spawning new programs.... a superlative accomplishment!

So I've never understood people who say that evolution disproves God -- to those fellow students and a bunch more of us, it does quite the opposite!

Tuur said:

So when God said He created all things, you're inclined not to believe Him?

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There is no dispute over that. The dispute is in the means used.

I come to this issue through studying ancient Hebrew,including the study of ancient near eastern literary types and discovering that long ago Hebrew scholars studied the Hebrew text of the first Creation account and reached a number of conclusions:

1. * the universe began as something smaller than a grain of mustard (i.e. tiny beyond imagining)
2. * the universe was ancient beyond the ability of humans to grasp
3. * the universe expanded inconceivably rapidly, filled with a fluid that just kept expanding, until
4. * the fluid became stretched thin, at which point God commanded light into existence
5. * the Earth was ancient beyond the counting of years
6. * the days of creation one through three were purely "divine days" because there was no one to measure time
7. * days four and five were divine days but were shifting towards solar days
8. * on the sixth day regular time started flowing the moment there was a man to perceive time

The moment I read that I realized I'd never look at Genesis the same way again. Then when I started encountering literary forms from the ancient near east I noticed that some of them match the forms of the Genesis Creation accounts.

So my journey started with the text, and if evolution needed four billion years for humans to appear, that wasn't a problem in terms of time! After a God is called "the Ancient of Days", a title which implies that God was around the Earth for a very, very long time before He added humans to the mix.