The morning and evenings are beginning and endings, like the sun rising or setting on an empire or an age.
I believe there's a different word for age than for day.
The Genesis creation account is a simplified poetic story told to man in a earlier age. The fact that each creative day is described as having a morning and an evening does not in itself require that they be literal days.
If you want to be that liberal in interpretation, that's our option. I tend to apply a more conservative interpretation, leaving the word "day" intact, but applying textual implications to the length of the day. Remember that the Sabbath Day was the 7th, a literal day, for which the ancient Hebrews as well as some of us today still honor with a 24 hour rest.
Remember many things in the Bible are told in signs that have larger meanings like the parables Jesus told. Sometimes you have think a bit to discover the answer, this is part of how things in the Bible were hidden by God.
Yes, and when parables were intended, they were usually so designated. Too much human tampering via thought can distort the message so as to arrive at a false conclusion. Thus the emergence of so much false doctrines which caused so much ignorance and deception as so warned throughout the scriptures. The original fall of man in the garden came about by Satan's liberal interpretation of God's warnings.
On the length of the creative days, each one had a morning and an evening, all but the seventh day. Each of the earlier days we are told ended, but not the seventh, the Bible indicates that it is still on going. At Genesis 2:3 the seventh day starts and is on going, being referred to in Hebrew chapter 4 as still going on.
Off topic, but the Hebrews account is an analogy of the the literal Genesis day, imo.
As for the tree rings, the pre-flood climate may have something to do with that if there were a terrarium atmosphere over the earth.
A Second line of evidence I looked at was the pattern seen in fossil distribution around the world and the connection with rates of continental drift. What I found was that the patterns matched the movements of the continents, thus it was possible to use the rates of possible movement to estimate how long ago the animals had lived. Using the highest rates of movement seen today and even allowing for faster movement in the past, it is very apparent great lengths of time were involved in the creation of life on earth. While I am still doubtful about the accuracy of the timing of these pass events, it is apparent that they occurred and that they occurred very long ago.
You may also want to consider that a literal 24 creative day would only work for the one narrow area of the globe that would happened to be in the right place for the dawn, all the other areas would be out of position anyway. The sun can only shine on one side of the earth at a time, thus when God said let there be light, half the surface of the earth will not see it until later. Then when evening comes, and the one area that was in the right position to see the dawn, sees the sun set, an other part of the surface is just seeing the sun rise and the day is already ending. If you travel around the world you cross the international dateline at which you pass from one day of the week into another. Since the earth is a globe, such a arbitrary line is unavoidable, and since the earth was round at creation too, there would of had to been one then too. So you have the situation that if the creative days were literal days of 24 hours each and followed local time, there would have been a place on the earth were you would have a line that you could set across which would have one day on one side and a different day on the other. The only way of avoiding this situation is to start and end each day earth wide at the same time regardless of local time. Which would mean that the morning and evening of each day is merely the beginning and ending respectively of each day. So when you look at it in detail, there is no way the morning and evening of each creative day could have been literal without raising illogical conundrums.
The unknowns, of course in all this are many, as a sunless lighted and heated earth, the HS not being required to be consistently positioned and otherwise regulated with restrictions a sun would have. As stated, it is this variation in conditions which my hypothesis includes so as to produce the desired conditions God wanted for preparing the earth for life.
As for your other stuff on the length of days, the word is often used in reference to a period of time in history, but context so implies. To debate this at length would be to go off topic.
The immeasurable present is forever consuming the eternal future and extending the infinite past. buzsaw
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