The Days of Creation in Genesis 1 were not Literal 24-hr days like we have today.

The days of creation in Genesis 1 cannot be literal 24 days for the following reasons: (1) Genesis 1:14-18 records that the sun, moon and stars were made on the fourth day. The purpose of these heavenly bodies, especially the sun, is stated in verse 17 and 18 as "to give light upon the earth, to govern the day and the night." God said in verse 14 they would "mark seasons and days and years." Therefore, there was no sunrise or sunset, no sun or moon to give us literal 24 hour days on days one, two and three. It's hard to explain how the first three days were literal 12 hour periods of light and darkness without the sun. But even more, it was the creation of the sun (according to verse 14) that gave us literal days and years. Thus, the first three days cannot be understood literally, or else we have a serious contradiction between God separating a literal 12 hour day from a literal 12 hour night twice. (Gen 1:4-5 and 1:18) (2) Assuming my opponent believes the Christian tradition that Adam and Eve were the first two humans God created, we have a situation where Adam named all the animals before God created Eve. Genesis 2:20 says that Adam named all the animals but for him, there was found no helper. Eve was created later, but no record is mention of her naming animals. Since both Adam and Eve were created on the sixth day (Gen 1:27-31), Adam had to name every single kind of animal in one day, in fact, less than one day to make time for the creation of Eve. They are so many millions of species of birds and mammals alone that no man could have named all in just 24 hours. http://www.nature.com... "Global biodiversity is the measure of biodiversity on planet Earth and is defined as the total variability of life forms. More than 99 percent of all species,[1] that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct.[2][3] Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 2 million to 1012,[4] of which about 1.6 million have been databased thus far[5] and over 80 percent have not yet been described.[6] More recently, in May 2016, scientists reported that 1 trillion species are estimated to be on Earth currently with only one-thousandth of one percent described.[7]"https://en.wikipedia.org... (3) In the Hebrew text of Genesis 2:4, the Hebrew word for "day" is used to describe all 6 creative time periods, saying that the heavens and the earth were made in just one day instead of six. This could never be a 24 hour day, and yet, the same word is used for each of the six days in chapter 1. This shows that the author feels free to use the word "day" to mean a long period of time. 4) All the major continents on earth were once a single land mass known as Pangea. http://www.google.com...... Satellite imagery shows that continents move away from each other at a rate of 2 cm per year, the same rate at which a finger nail grows. At that rate, it would have taken the continents at least 200 million years to reach their current positions. ( 6.0 6.1 Laurie R. Godfrey (1983). "Scientists Confront Creationism". W. W. Norton & Company, Canada. Pages 35-36) That length of time would take us way back before Adam was created around 6 to 7 thousand years ago depending on which Bible chronology you choose. 5) It takes a full year to lay down a pair of sedimentary varves. The Green River formation in Utah is home to twenty million years worth of such varves. 3) Radiometric dating technique include radiocarbon, argon-argon, iodine-xenon, lanthanum-barium, lead-lead, lutetium-hafnium, neon-neon, potassium-argon, rhenium-osmium, rubidium-strontium, samarium-neodymium, uranium-lead, uranium-lead-helium, uranium-thorium, and uranium-uranium, and every single one dates objects far older than 10,000 years. Further, while these dating techniques have different decay rates, half-lives and so forth, they all agree on the age of the earth around 4.5 billion years old. http://www.talkorigins.org...... 4) The Andromeda Nebula is 2 million light years away from the earth, so the light from there took at least 2 million years to reach the earth so we can see it. 5) Counting annual layers, scientists have found 700 000 layers of ice in a single sheet of ice, showing from the ice core series the earth is much older than 10 000 years. (Matt Brinkman (1995). "Ice Core Dating"(TalkOrigins) The days of creation therefore, could not have been literal days or else the earth would only be around 7000 years old. (6) Each of the creative days in Genesis 1 contains the statement "and the evening and the morning was" the first, second, third day, and so on. This shows that these period began and ended. But no such statement is made about the seventh day in Genesis 2:1-3 showing that it continued. Hebrews 3:7-4:11 explains that this seventh day rest is still continuing, and we enter it by faith. This shows the seventh day wasn't a 24 hour day, and thus we can conclude that neither were the other six. I will stop here for now, and let my opponent present his case.