I agree. The other question usually asked is how god can care about us when we're just an insignificant speck among the 100 billion stars in our galaxy and the hundred billion galaxies.

I admit to being awestruck at these two things (the vastness of the universe and deep time). I contemplate them a lot and am genuinely curious what others think about when contemplating them.

Yeah.

I get that, but it just seems like such a cop out argument. It's all too easy to simply say, "god isn't subject to time", or "it could be like 15 seconds to a god". No matter what concept of time you subscribe to, you still have the math to deal with. There's no getting around the fact that our existence is an impossibly small fraction of the whole.

Same.

I think the meaning of this passage is something more like: "God's sense of time is different than ours". It is not a literal meaning that God relates to time at a ratio of 1 day: 1 thousand years.

The meaning of the passage is primarily in reference to God's perspective of time, namely that time doesn't matter to him the way it does to us. I am not arguing for this but simply saying this is a standard Christian answer I would expect in response to OP.

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.

He's busy giving kids bone cancer

Masturbating

God made Adam as an adult, so he could have have the earth some years older too!

Anyone who believes that the Universe is only 13.6 BILLION years old has got to be an idiot with absolutely no commonsense.

FYP

What about those of us who aren't scientists that consider the age of the universe as yet undetermined?

has the universe always existed?

<br />
<br />
What about those of us who aren't scientists that consider the age of the universe as yet undetermined?<br />
<br />
has the universe always existed?[/QUOTE]

Then that's another discussion. But calling some of the brightest minds on the planet idiots with nothing to back it up is a bit laughable.

Also, 'only' 13.6 billion years lol

Evolving.

Same thing as when I contemplate what death is like: cold sweats and sheer panic