How Long Was a Day in Genesis?

[Ken Anderson]

@Mary Robi's post in the Murky History thread brought this up, as a reply, but I didn't want to create a digression in that thread, so I thought I'd bring it here. Please don't misunderstand me, Mary; your post was perfectly on-topic in that thread, but my reply would have been a digression, so I am bringing it here instead.

It seems to me that some of the questions about a young earth and a 6,000-year timeline could be put to rest if we Christians were willing to acknowledge that a day during creation wasn't necessarily the 24-hour day we're familiar with. For one thing, according to Genesis 1:1-5, God created light and darkness, calling them "day" and night," on the first day of creation, while Genesis 1:14-19 tells us that He didn't create the sun, the moon, and the stars until the fourth day of creation.

Given that the Bible wasn't intended to be a comprehensive history of the Earth and the Universe, and that there are many other things that are left unexplained, it doesn't seem wrong to me, as a Christian, to question whether the days of creation were the same as the days we are familiar with. To me, that makes more sense than some of the crazy explanations that Young Earthers have come up with.

 

[Connie Bennett]

@Ken Anderson,

2 Peter 3:8 says: The "But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."

I interpret that particular scripture as literal and it took God seven thousand years to create earth, not seven-24 hour days

 

[Paul Couillard]

AI Overview:

"According to science, the Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old, with an uncertainty of about 1%.

How Scientists Figured It Out:

Radiometric Dating: Scientists measure the decay of radioactive isotopes (like uranium decaying into lead) inside rocks.

Meteorites: Because Earth's active crust recycles rocks through plate tectonics, scientists date meteorites that formed at the same time as the rest of the solar system.

Lunar Samples: Rocks brought back from the Moon, which lacks plate tectonics, help confirm these planetary timelines.

Ancient Crystals: Tiny zircon crystals found on Earth have been dated to over 4 billion years old, providing a baseline minimum age for our planet's crust."

The Bible writers (writing in the 1st-millennium BCE) didn't know how old the Earth was because they were writing more than 2,000 years before the Age of Scientific Discovery in the 1700s.