"Q: How can the saying of the bible (sic) that God created the world in six days coincide with the opinion of the geologist that the age of the earth is thousands even millions of years?
A: The days of creation are not Solar days as our days now... The day of creation is a period of time, not known how long, could have been a second or thousands or millions of years. This period was determined by the saying "so the evening and the morning were..."
The proofs for this are many we mention a few of them:
1. The Solar day is the period of time between the sunrise and its rising again or between the sunset and its setting again. Since the Sun was not created till the fourth day [Genesis 1:16-19]...then the first four days were not solar days.
2. The seventh day, the bible did not say that it was over till now...
This bible (sic) did not say [so the evening and the morning were the seventh day], and thousands of years passed from Adam till now without the end of the seventh day. Accordingly, the days of creation are not Solar days but unknown periods of time.
3. As a whole, the bible said about all the creation and its six days: "This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in {the day} that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." [Genesis 2:4]
So the bible summed up in the word {day} all the six days of creation.
Then the geologist can say whatever about the age of the earth, the bible did not mention any age for the earth that contradicts what the geologists say.
The way the Lord looks to the measurment of time explained by the apostle's saying:- With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" [2Pet 3:8]. "
--quote from H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and all the Coptic Orthodox Church.
If you take the literal 6 day creation point of view, you miss so much beauty and truth in the Bible. The Bible says that light was before the sun, this is refering to the nebula that scientists tell us of from which the solar system came. Scientists try to make evidence match thier theory of evolution, but if you take out their tampering, the evidence actually supports creation in phases over long periods of time, which is what the Bible says if you take a day to be an age. Science agrees with the oder given to us in the Bible.
When St. Moses wrote this passage, I seriously doubt that he was sitting down to write a scientific expositioni of the method used by God for creation. His ways are beyond our understanding! Rather St. Moses wrote a beautiful poem, praising God for His sovernty and goodness, and explaining the beginning of the story of our fall and redemption.
This is not lying, this is not untruth, this is not error in the Bible. In our modern left-brained world we've forgotten about art, and truth through art, we have the silly notion that something is only true if it's scientific. But the ancients knew how to express truth through art, and that's what this is. We can learn so much from it if we look for the true, theological points that we are meant to find, or we can just read it as a dry historical account that doesn't really have any direct bearing on us.
God created everything. He created everything Good. He is all powerful. He created us in a different state then we're in now after the fall. These are the things we should be taking from this passage, not dry scientific facts that the author (the direct author, St. Moses, or the primary authory, God) didn't intend to convey through this wonderful passage.
