Augustine for example could not believe it would take God as long as six days to create anything including the universe and suggested those chapters, therefore, had to be read as a literary framework.
Right! I'd read some of Augustine's views (he having come
up more than one viewpoint on Genesis 1), and that's a good point: why would it take God so long, and why would God have to 'rest' and so on....
I came to the literal view from a more liberal one that originally granted greater credulity to academia and modern science than I do now.
That's almost like me, but not quite, as there's an important difference. Consider: we don't have 'credulity' that the moon orbits the Earth, for example, but instead we can observe it and literally have with telescopes, at different phases. After enough observations, we can figure out it's orbiting the Earth.
It's also possible to directly see by
observation (without theories) that most stars are further away than 10,000 light years.
Not using theories, but instead direct observations -- we literally can see they are further away than 10,000 light years(!). Let me explain.
I directly myself did the rotating mirror experiment (in a physics lab) to measure the speed of light. Did it myself, setting it up, measuring, calculating, the whole 10 yards. Understanding every piece, and literally measuring the deflection of the returning laser beam on the rotating mirror.
Doing all the calculations with the measurements I did personally, I got a measurement for the speed of light. I got ~ 300,000 km/sec.
So, it's not theoretical to me that light travels at that speed, but something I literally have observed. Directly.
Now, if we add trigonometry, which some or many of us have used, even some in the real world with objects more than once or twice, we can then understand 'parallax'.
Parallax isn't just a theoretical idea, but something
you have personally observed also --
parallax is something you've seen also: when you move sideways and closer objects appear to move sideways against a more distant background -- that's the movement used to calculate 'parallax'.
We just add trigonometry to then determine how close the nearby object is from measuring the movement you did and the apparent movement the near object appears to make against the distant background.
Using just these: the speed of light and parallax, we can see that many stars are more distant than 10,000 light years, so that their light has traveled more than 10,000 years to reach us since it was emitted.
It's not just theory, it's direct observation without any theories or assumptions past trigonometry and how the speed of light remains consistent over large distances (as we've directly observed in such examples as signals from space probes having a time delay to reach Earth from a great distance).