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The 4th option is the one that Nachmanides put forward in the 12 century: That when we consider space/time expansion, a person creating our universe would only need to labor for 6 days in order to carry out work that would appear to have taken 15 billion years to have happened when observed from within the universe. Age of the UniverseSee, and you may not like this answer but it was also part of the article linked on the age of the universe and it supposes the first 5 days of creation aren't the same 24 hour periods that we perceive in our time, I see the first few chapters of Genesis as explanations for children in a way they understand, and really the semantics and time are just not important for us to know. A day, a billion years? All the same to someone who exists independent of time and lives forever.
There is 3 ways you can go about looking at the dilemma.
1. Literal Genesis, young earth creation, 6 24 hour periods, poofing things into existence, which presents problems where you find evidence contrary that you have to just pretend doesn't exist or think that it was created to deceive us, but creating evidence specifically to deceive (and I don't think God gave Satan the power to create) would be lying, and God cannot lie. So God creating light coming from stars billions of light years away reaching us now to deceive us into disbelieving in him? No no no. God does not deceive, trick, or lie. It also differs from the fact that God used men over many many generations to write the bible rather than just speaking it into existence. It's his Word, the most important thing, and he trusts the hands of men to write it down to pass on? Two things slow processes (the second being the creation of the new heaven and earth), everything else instantaneously?
2. Genesis is parable/not meant to be a literal step by step explanation, it's simplified for children just to get us to the more important stuff. This allows everything we discover about God's creation to hold true to our own observations, while still giving the universe an ultimate causation, and God doing things through slower processes is consistent in how the bible was made, is consistent for why didn't he just speak a perfect creation into being, and why God is revealed through nature, because he is a natural God that does things through natural laws. He could do things instantly, but some things he certainly hasn't done instantly, which leads me to believe that instant isn't his plan.
3. Genesis isn't real and you don't believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at all. Obviously the worst way to go. The first two are just differing interpretations of the Word and having different opinions on the semantics of it, but we both believe the most important things, that God is the root of all creation, that he created us, that we failed him, and that he loves us anyway and offers us a route to salvation. The third.. there's no faith at all there, or it's faith in a lie. You'd either believe the Universe has no cause, that it just spontaneously happened for no reason, or you believe in some other religion like an eastern religion or paganism or whatever
In this way we can see that both long and short age perspectives are true depending on the perspective we take.
But God is no deceiver, it is true that He created the Heavens and the Earth in 6 days of time equivalent to our solar day.
The question is whether we are prepared to trust Him on the subject or not.
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