Hi, I'm also a newbie here. Atheist, but not really a skeptic.
I think the six days of creation in the Bible are clearly meant to be 24-hour periods. I have the following arguments for this:
- the hebrew word used in the original text is Yom, which means (period of) daylight. It can also mean an unspecified period of time (as in "in the days of adam"), but never in connection with a number, such as "first yom", "second yom" etc. It then always is a literal day.
- the plural yamim always means literal days, and never an undefined period. In Exodus 20:11 it says "for in six days (yamim) the Lord made the heavens and the earth..."
- even if yom is to be understood as an undefined period of time, then how are we to understand "evening" and "morning" in gen.1:8-31? Surely they refer to literal days.
- Adam was created on day 6. If day 7 in fact was thousands of years, then he would haven been at least thousands of years old when he died. But the Bible tells us that he lived a mere 900 years.
And as a sidenote I would like to know this: if God is all powerful, why did it take him six days to create the universe? Why didn't he just snap his fingers and create in an instant?
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