I would argue that Ken Hamm <sp?> and the creation museum has done more to push people away from faith than Anton LeVay and Aleister Crowley.
The amount of "reading in" to what isn't written in Genesis by the young earthers borders on heresy. It also is a total affront to any credible scholarship of biblical Hebrew.
1. Just looking at what the text says in Genesis 1, there are at least three different kinds of days. The first three days are of unknown duration because the Sun and Moon don’t appear until day 4. The next three are governed by the “two great lights.” Day 7 is different because it has no “evening and morning.” Given this disparity in how the Bible characterizes the various days of creation, I agree with St. Augustine that “What kind of days these are is difficult or even impossible for us to imagine, to say nothing of describing them.”
2. Given that the seventh day is not closed out in Genesis 1 or 2, it continues today. Consider God’s words to the nation of Israel in Psalm 95:11, “So I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest.’ ” Hebrews 4:1–11 connects this declaration back to creation day 7, and then says that we can enter God’s rest today. If the seventh day encompasses far longer than 24 hours, it seems likely that the first six do also.
3. In Genesis 1, the biblical author uses the word for day (yom) with multiple different meanings. Genesis 1:3–5 uses yom for the daylight portion of the day. Genesis 1:14–19 uses yom to mean a “24-hour” day. Genesis 2:4 uses the word yom to refer to the entire creation week. So the big question remains: when the author uses yom for the first day, the second day, etc, what is the proper meaning?
4. The activities of day 6 described in Genesis 2 argue for a much longer period of time than 24 hours. God created Adam, placed him in the garden to tend it, commanded him not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, had Adam name the animals in order to show Adam that he was alone, caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, performed some form of biopsy, fashioned Eve, and presented her to Adam. Genesis 1:24–31 indicates that this all happened in the later portion of the day. In reading multiple translations of Genesis 2:23, at least part of Adam’s response includes “At last, someone suitable for me.” This statement implies a lengthy passage of time.
So lets be literalist about Genesis since fundamentalists like literalism.
On the seventh day, Adam first went and named all the animals. How many animals exist today? There are 8.7 Million species on the planet TODAY. Roughly 770 Million to several BILLION animals have existed over all time on planet earth.
So lets get this straight, Adam spent the first part of the 6th day naming ALL the animals. Even if you just abridge it to "kinds" of animals which wouldn't be literal it would be tens of thousands of animals. Assuming they all assembled single-file for this naming activity, the time required to utter a name for each of the animals that lived in the Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates would take decades.
But what does the bible say? In Genesis 2:19 it literally says the following: Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.
That to a literalist must be a VERY busy morning!!!
But somehow Adam managed to name ALL the animals in that morning, but amidst that mathematically long process he replied in Genesis 2:23 that God then created eve and Adam replied "At last, someone suitable for me.” What do you mean "AT LAST" literalists? It was a busy morning and you're acting like you were waiting a VERY long time for a companion?
What if ALL the animals of the garden only totaled 100,000 kinds? To utter them nonstop one after another without rest as if counting to 100,000 would take FORTY hours without break.
Fundamentalists claim they are literalists, but as you can see they do not literally believe what is actually written, because their beliefs do not adhere to exactly what was written. They build a scaffold on mistranslation and inferences that are not their regarding the Hebrew word Yom.
Hebrew is a very allegorical language. Yom is an especially figurative word used to describe eras, epochs, dates, groups of days, and general periods of time.
