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

1 - The sun is not what makes our day's a day? The text says "the evening and the morning" were the first day, so if you interpret this literally, you have sunrise (morning) and sunset (evening) as is the meaning of those terms when used literally in Dan 8:14 and other verses. It's the sun that gives us 12 hours of light as the earth spins. Without it, there would be darkness. Now, you claim that when God made light on day 1, this light was shining down from the sky to the earth. Where does the text say that? It doesn't. Notice verse 1 makes us aware that this isn't the creation of the earth only, but also of the heavens (plural), so this light could have been anywhere. My opponent is imagining God to be shining down on the earth on day one, so why isn't he there now as our second sun? And where does the text say that he moved? This is speculation by Con. Con admits that when God made light, he "don't know exactly what this means," so why use it? It means what it says, that God made light in general, that doesn't say the light was shining down on earth as part of the first day. The he adds "but it is reasonable to suggest," you mean "ASSUME," well, Biblical doctrine isn't based on assumption but on what we know. Then he interprets Revelation 21:23 literally in the most symbolic book of the Bible. 2 " He claims that Adam only named the animals he had at the time, not the ones we have today. Really? He should have seen in my quotation from Wikipedia that "More than 99 percent of all species,[1] that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct." https://en.wikipedia.org...... So we actually have less species today than Adam did, not more. So the number of animal kinds wasn"t increasing but decreasing with time. I wonder if he believes in macroevolution, because you simply can't get a zebra from a lion, so even if we call all the kinds of dogs one kind, that still leaves horses, elephants, jiraffes, monkeys, cows, kangaroos, snakes, turtles, koalas, bears, and we could go on and on. Doves didn't evolved into eagles did they? Yes, Adam was perfect, but no matter how smart he was he had limited time. It's so childish to imagine him rattling off names in just seconds to name all the animals in one day. Just look at this amazing diversity and think of how much time you think Adam must have devoted to examining each one to come up with a proper name. http://www.arkive.org... It says that God was bringing the animals to Adam to see what he would call them. (Gen 2:19) Nowhere does it say God helped Adam name them as Con claims. How long do you think it took for the turtles to get in line before Adam? I would like Con to give us an estimate of how many animals you think Adam could have named in a day. The maximum. I can find more species than that alive today, plus the ones that went extinct! No man could name them in 24 hours. 3 " What Yom means most of the time is irrelevant. The issue is, what does it mean in Genesis 1? I have shown that the purpose of the sun was to give literal days and years, therefore, there were none before the sun was created. 4 - Pangea is a theory? So is gravity, don't you believe in gravity? Just like gravity, however, there is good evidence for pangea: "Fossil evidence for Pangaea includes the presence of similar and identical species on continents that are now great distances apart. For example, fossils of the therapsid Lystrosaurus have been found in South Africa, India and Antarctica, alongside members of the Glossopteris flora, whose distribution would have ranged from the polar circle to the equator if the continents had been in their present position; similarly, the freshwater reptile Mesosaurus has been found in only localized regions of the coasts of Brazil and West Africa.[19] Additional evidence for Pangaea is found in the geology of adjacent continents, including matching geological trends between the eastern coast of South America and the western coast of Africa. The polar ice cap of the Carboniferous Period covered the southern end of Pangaea. Glacial deposits, specifically till, of the same age and structure are found on many separate continents which would have been together in the continent of Pangaea.[20]... The continuity of mountain chains provides further evidence for Pangaea. One example of this is the Appalachian Mountains chain which extends from the southeastern United States to the Caledonides of Ireland, Britain, Greenland, and Scandinavia.[22]" https://en.wikipedia.org... As for Noah"s Flood, while I believe it happened, it certainly isn"t the reason the earth looks the way it does. Here is why: (a) Why are geological eras consistent worldwide? How do you explain worldwide agreement between "apparent" geological eras and several different (independent) radiometric and nonradiometric dating methods? This link gives actual meteorite samples that were tested using many different dating methods and they all agree unanimously on the age of the earth in the billions of years. http://www.talkorigins.org... Young earth creationist's (YEC's) approach of focusing on examples where radiometric dating yields incorrect results is weak for two reasons. First, it provides no evidence whatsoever to support their claim that the earth is very young. If the earth were only 6000"10 000 years old, then surely there should be some scientific evidence to confirm that hypothesis; yet they have produced not a shred of it so far. Where are the data and age calculations that result in a consistent set of ages for all rocks on earth, as well as those from the moon and the meteorites, no greater than 10 000 years? Glaringly absent, it seems. Second, they seem to think that a few examples of incorrect radiometric ages invalidate all of the results of radiometric dating, but such a conclusion is illogical. Even things that work well do not work well all of the time and under all circumstances. Try, for example, wearing a watch that is not waterproof while swimming. It will probably fail, but what would a reasonable person conclude from that? That watches do not work? Hardly. A few verified examples of incorrect radiometric ages are simply insufficient to prove that radiometric dating is invalid. All they indicate is that the methods are not infallible. Those of us who have developed and used dating techniques to solve scientific problems are well aware that the systems are not perfect; we ourselves have provided numerous examples of instances in which the techniques fail. We often test them under controlled conditions to learn when and why they fail so we will not use them incorrectly. "Most of the "anomalous" ages cited by creation "scientists" in their attempt to discredit radiometric dating are actually misrepresentations of the data, commonly cited out of context and misinterpreted" as can be seen in examples here: http://www.talkorigins.org... (b) Why didn't at least one dinosaur make it to the high ground with the elephants? Obviously, they lived in a different era. (c) Why don't any modern-looking plants appear as low in the geological column as Precambrian plant? And yes, the geologic column is real and is found in 26 basins around the world including North Dakota. http://www.talkorigins.org... The dates of these ecological ages were assigned by geologist long before Darwin got the scientific community interested in evolution, so you can't show the dates were conjured up to accommodate evolution. (d) Why did extinct animals which lived in the same niches as present animals didn't survive as well. Why did no pterodons make it to high ground? (e) The flood doesn't explain how coral reefs hundreds of feet thick and miles long were preserved intact with other fossils below them, or why small organisms dominate the lower strata, whereas fluid mechanics says they would sink slower and thus end up in upper strata. Only an old earth fits all this data. (f) No human artifacts are found except in the very uppermost strata. If, at the time of the Flood, the earth was overpopulated by people with technology for shipbuilding, why were none of their tools or buildings mixed with trilobite or dinosaur fossils? (g) Why ecological information is consistent within but not between layers. Fossil pollen is one of the more important indicators of different levels of strata. Each plant has different and distinct pollen, and, by telling which plants produced the fossil pollen, it is easy to see what the climate was like in different strata. Was the pollen hydraulically sorted by the flood water so that the climatic evidence is different for each layer? (h) How could a flood deposit layered fossil forests? Stratigraphic sections showing a dozen or more mature forests layered atop each other--all with upright trunks, in-place roots, and well-developed soil--appear in many locations. One example, the Joggins section along the Bay of Fundy, shows a continuous section 2750 meters thick (along a 48-km sea cliff) with multiple in-place forests, some separated by hundreds of feet of strata, some even showing evidence of forest fires. Deposition by flood fails to explain the roots, the soil, the layering, and other features found in such places. (i) Finally, the flood doesn't explain away the fact that volcanic ash from eruptions in known human history are found in the ice core series, and the exact amount of layers are found between the layers with volcanic ash as we find on our history calendars between eruptions, proving that these truly are annual layers. These layers testify to an old earth as well. These facts prove the earth is millions, billions of years old, and thus the creation days were long periods of time. I will respond to the rest of my opponents arguments next round.