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Originally Posted by Pokerlogist
I'm not sure that it matters to anybody, but this might clear things up a little. The mainline Christian and Catholic churches do not reject the theory of evolution or the billion year time of creation. The ideas of Creationism and the 7,00-8,000 year duration is mostly preached by Fundamentalists, a small fraction of Christianity. As far as I know, there is no way to get a reliable length of time of creation from the Bible so there really is not much chance if finding a real conflict with the scientific evidence. One reason is that the unit of time in Genesis is the Hebrew word "yom" which has an vague duration. It could mean 1 billion years or 24 hrs, depending on context.
I'm not even really concerned about the whole "a day is a billion years" thing. We can't reasonably say what the time period is for creation so it is basically up to interpretation. If God sat around for 99.999986% (200,000 years vs. 13.798 billion) of the time, I don't think that we can really judge whether that makes sense or not. The reality is that this only makes up Genesis 1:1-25. It's 551 words that describe almost everything that has happened in the history of the world (universe). The 774,195 words of the Bible describe in some detail the most recent events. The fact that the most important part is only 551 words pretty much leaves all of it up for interpretation.
That being said, I'm more concerned about the rest of Genesis. Adam (the first man) is created by God. After 1,500-1600 years (this timeline is very clear in Genesis), Noah sails his ship through the flood. Yes, the fundamentalists would say that the events surrounding Noah happened 4,500 years ago. If you are saying there is a compatibility between Science and the Bible, then when did these events happen? If you are saying that Adam and Eve were born at the beginning of the advanced Sapiens, then this event happened 100,000+ years ago and Noah was building a ship at the same time that Sapiens were just figuring out spears and slings. If you say that Noah was 4,500 years ago, then what about the hundreds of thousands of years or human and pre-human development that occurred before Adam.
There are only two explanations to explain the disconnect between Science and the Bible. One, God has intentionally deceived human beings by having their science based on intentionally false information (i.e. the universe is really 6,000 years old and all of the information that we have to know otherwise has been fabricated by God to willfully deceive us). Two, the Bible (at least the Creationist bits) are false.