Hi
@Rachel20
what requires (scripturally) a creation day to be a constant length?
Well, I'm merely speaking of the word 'day' in general. A day is not, as many seem to think, some result of the sun. A day is merely defined, today as it has been for centuries, as the time that passes as the earth spins on its axis. Now, were the 'creation' days different in length? Possibly by a few hours or something if the earth, for some unknown reason, would have been spinning slower or faster than it currently spins today. But would they have to be of constant length? Well, knowing that the earth is this huge ball of matter spinning in the cosmos, its ability to change its speed of rotation from one day to the next would be a fairly difficult task, I would think.
Further, what would be the reason for the earth to spin slower or faster, by any meaningful amount, during the creation days than it does today? I certainly can't understand that it would spin millions of years slower. Knowing God as I do, I'm confident that if the days had been particularly different than we experience today, then He would likely have given us an indication of that.
God is wise. He is wiser than you or I could ever even hope to imagine to be. He raised up a people on the face of the earth to do His bidding. Paul mentions the fact that one of the chief reasons that there even were Jews, was that they were entrusted with the very oracles of God. God wants you and I to know Him and He isn't playing games with us. He wants you to know that this realm in which we live is by His design and it is therefore by His design that men might seek His salvation. This entire realm of existence was created by a God who loves you and loves me and wants us to know the truth about 'who' He is and 'who' we are and all that entails. I fully believe that if God wanted us to think of the creation event in different lengths of time than what is considered a standard ordinary day, then He would have used another descriptor.
He wants us to know and understand that we aren't living in some realm that took billions and billions of years to eventually become what it has become. To know that we are living in a realm of His design and His creating. A realm that came about by a miracle of His creative abilities and talents and power and wisdom. A perfect realm in which we were designed to live, but sin ruined all that. When Adam and Eve walked in the garden before sin, the creation was perfect for what it was intended to do. To sustain the life of human creatures that God wanted to love and have a relationship with.
This realm didn't sit around for billions of years all empty of living creatures just waiting to form, through some natural processes, what we see today. No!!! Not at all! This realm was created perfect for what it was intended to be for. It was done in a very, very short period of time and when it was completed by the power and the wisdom of God, He stooped down and scraped up some dirt in His hand and formed it into the likeness of a man and blew into that clump of dirt the breath of life. His breath.
Man doesn't want to believe that because it then means that we're all convicted of sin just as the Scriptures declare. So man looks upon the vastness of space and decides that all that we see must have taken eons to come together as dust and rocks swirled about in the cosmos. He comes up with perfectly good sounding theories that fit, somewhat, with what we see. But as I mentioned, what man comes up with doesn't exactly match up with God's own testimony of why we are all here and how we got here. It's a good sounding argument with lots of proposed theories that seem to make a lot of sense to us. But it denies God's work as He describes it to us in His account of how and why we got to be here.
So, a day is a day. There really isn't any reason to believe, other than we want to deny that God really is as powerful and wise and majestic as He claims to be, to believe that the creation days were somehow different than most of the days that we live through today, as regards their length.
Me, I don't have the slightest problem reading the Scriptures and understanding that God really did all this creating just as He has told us that He did. I don't have any problem understanding and seeing the purpose in His creating all that He has created. What I do have a problem with is that every explanation of man, just as with the flood, denies at least some of the facts we are given from God's account.
I've seen it mentioned on here that the flood is believed by some to have been a 'local' flood. So I ask, name me one place upon the face of the earth where flood waters could have stood that fits the description of the flood account in the Scriptures? In Genesis 8:1-5, we read that the flood waters covered the earth for 150 days. Ok, let's go with this 'local' theory. Where on the earth, knowing that the natural property of water is to seek level, could flood waters have stood for 150 days?
We have floods all the time, certainly not as deep or possibly as widespread as the 'local' flood of Noah's day, but...when we consider that from the moment that the waters reached their peak, supposedly at the end of the 40 days and nights of rain, where would those waters have remained as a flood for 150 days? There isn't any place on the earth where the water isn't just going to bleed away down some stream or river or mountain valley to the 'dry' parts of the earth, or into the ocean.
So the LORD said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—
How is God going to accomplish that task without flooding the entire dry land of the earth?
Yes, the days of creation were just pretty regular days in length and God did flood the entire earth, as His testimony declares.
The five and a half days of Genesis are not of equal duration. Each time the universe doubles in size, the perception of time halves as we project that time back toward the beginning of the universe. The rate of doubling, that is the fractional rate of change, is very rapid at the beginning and decreases with time simply because as the universe gets larger and larger, even though the actual expansion rate is approximately constant, it takes longer and longer for the overall size to double.
All a very fine sounding theory. Does he explain 'why' he believes that every time the universe doubles the perception of time halves? Why would that be? Does an expanding universe really have any effect on time, as it is experienced on one planetary body within the middle, or somewhere within the confines, of that first size of the universe? I mean, is there some theorem that says as the universe expands the rotation of the planetary bodies within the beginning part of the universe will slow down? I haven't read his work, but that right there sounds to me like a good place to go, Hmmmm? I wonder why he thinks that time halves every time the universe doubles. Is there a formula that proves that?
I'd be willing to bet that he's expecting everyone to just 'assume' that little niggling fact is true so that he can show how the days of creation may have been different in length. If he does have some formulary that shows his work, I'd like to see it. How about you? Would you like him to prove his basic premise first, before he moves away and expects you to believe that part so he can build the rest?
God bless,
Ted