The days in Genesis are 24-hour days

I. Age of the earth My opponent has presented with two possibilities both of which I will briefly refute. a. The gap theory is specifically made to accommodate evolution into the creation story, which it fails to do for several reasons. However, the "gap" between the first two verses is illogical as well. The authors intentions were clearly to start at day one.If we are speaking of the first day, then there are no days prior to the first day. The whole idea is a bit far-fetched and day one apparently encompasses the first verse. b. My opponent suggests that God created a universe with age, but this is illogical. This asserts that God created stones with a strange ratio of parent to daughter material indicating age and somehow the other rocks in the earth correlate with these dates. We can observe that time has gone into the geology around us. This also asserts that God sped up the light from the distant galaxies so that they would reach earth in six days despite being 13 billion light-years away, but for what purpose? Yes, Adam was not created as an infant, yet as far as we know, he did not physically age, he was 0 years old. He wouldn't have had wrinkles and white hair. Creating a perfect universe with billions of years of age would not make sense, and God is not illogical. When comparing these two explanations with the explanation that I have presented, that the first three days were unspecified long periods of time, the latter is more of a logical explanation. II. The trees and other plants And I quote my opponent: "'Does the verse directly say that the "Earth sprouted vegetation?' No." And then he says in the next paragraph: "Notice that it also says Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree or in other words 'Let the earth sprout vegetation!' " Since he cannot make up his mind, I will break this down in Hebrew. The Hebrew word, dasha means to sprout, shoot, grow green. My opponent suggests that the latter part of the verse suggests the plants already were there, yet, it only says the seed was there. The writing indicates that God sort of planted the seeds and they grew. This is all encompassed within the third day presenting a difficulty for the 24-hour interpretation. The verses in chapter 2 also suggest the earth was "seeded." The verse says the plants could not "sprout" because there was no water. I understand that plants need water–they are made of water. Plants do not need water to "appear," but rather they need it to naturally grow. If they simply "appeared" like we assume the animals did, then water would not have hindered this. This verse simply supports the idea that they grew naturally. Now back to my opponent's arguments. He claims that since there was light and time, the days were 24 hours long. However, there are cases where light and time are present and the days are not 24-hours. Time is not universally constant. Remember, I asserted that the days couldn't be defined as ‘24-hour period' because that would not have been the definition used by the writers of the book. They would have defined it according to the sun. Since there was no sun, we are left with the third definition, ‘an unspecified amount of time.' My opponent claims that the verse in 2 Peter contains a simile, but does this ruin my argument? Not at all. As the source says, the verse is "to teach that God is outside of time (because He is the Creator of time itself)." This is precisely the point I mean to make and supports my position. I know that the verse is not claiming a day is literally "a thousand years" but that doesn't mean there isn't a difference in perception of time. We don't say "an apple is like a thousand apples to me" unless I am starving. I ask reader to take all of the evidence for both sides and ask themselves, what makes the most sense. I find that my arguments are more coherent with both the Bible and science, thus I urge that readers vote Con. Thank you very much for reading and thank you Kohai for the debate [1] Brown-Driver-Briggs' Hebrew Definitions (Strong's H1876)