That would be my fault that you are confused. I thought that my irony would be self-evident – “This says nothing about an opaque atmosphere:” followed by “I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness”. It wasn’t, obviously.
I can’t speak for Dale but I didn’t notice anything in his posts suggesting that Dale thinks God made mandarin ducks for his enjoyment (and for the enjoyment of others) purely because “Dale happened to find a duck interesting.” My guess is that Dale has many other reasons for thinking in that way—such as a theological foundation for his worldview that is rooted in the Bible and his life experiences and observations.
However, I’ll let @DaleCutler confirm if my analysis of his position is accurate.
You would really need to show me where he said that the moon was created first. I really lack belief that he said that. 
It means that he created the universe (in an instant, as it turns out) and it included the stars and the planets (because, as it turns out, after that instantaneous beginning, it grew to include them). Verse 1 covers it.
Light existed quite early after ‘the big bang’ if cosmology is correct, but at the next point in the history related, verse 2, we have a new perspective which is explicitly stated (refer to the chart). The light was preexisting, but the earth had an opaque atmosphere. Light ‘did not exist’ at the earth’s surface.
The change of perspective is explicitly stated, as I just mentioned, and no ‘contortions’ have been performed.
Actually, it doesn’t, if you will read carefully.
Genesis 1:14-18. He let there be lights in the heavens. “Let” is not the same as “made” or “placed”. The “and it was so” precedes “God made” and “God set”, so note that verses 16-18 are not about when they were made, but why. The atmosphere has become transparent – the preexisting heavenly bodies can now be seen. And we do not have to invent a source of light for Days 1-3 as YECs do.
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Do you have any basis for this assertion of why or even that God created mandarin ducks?
Yeah, pretty much. Maybe your concept of God is too small.
You say “carefully”, I say “warping the clear meaning to fit what you want to see”. Tomato, tomahto. The first creative act is “Let there be light”. That’s creation through speech. The same wording occurs at the start of each creation day. The only thing transparent here is the attempt at fudging the text.
Now it appears that the ancient Hebrews did not assign all the light in the daytime sky to the sun, and it’s obvious to any naive observer that the sky itself glows blue. Day and night precede the creation of the sun and stars; that’s why the dark is separated from the light before the sun and stars are made. That’s what the text says without special pleading.
My concept of God is either very small or very large, depending on what quality you think nonexistence has. Your concept of God, on the other hand, seems not to stand up well to examination and seems to be mostly pareidolia. That’s what the bit about the plane crash survivor was intended to convey.
If “it grew to include them” is good enough to mean “created in an instant”, then wasn’t everything, including you, created in an instant? Sounds deist to me. Why do we need the 6 creation days? Why can’t we just say the created-in-an-instant universe grew to include them?
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If that surviver attributes his survival to God, he would be correct. It would mean his purpose here was not yet complete, especially if he is a Christian.
A series of co-instants last year:
From an mail to Matt, my pastor, 7/15/17 (Saturday):
//News
Just news, not good or bad particularly, but I am going to lose a kidney. My urologist called me after 5 yesterday and said that I had a mass on my right kidney.
I had blood late [Saturday night] last week, and, in God’s providence, when I called Monday a.m., the doctor had had an appointment cancelation for that afternoon. My Co-instants Log entry:
7/10/27 [Monday] Having developed a significant bleed, I had just tried to call the urology clinic. The line was busy [What?! No voice and answering system menu?!] so I picked up the nearby Joy & Strength* for today and read, "MOST GLADLY, THEREFORE, WILL I RATHER GLORY [BOAST! ] IN MY INFIRMITIES, THAT THE POWER OF CHRIST MAY REST UPON ME. 2 Corinthians xii.9 Wow. [The words jumped off the pages at me. “LORD, I HAVE AN INFIRMITY!!”, I immediately said.]
Then I called back and… the doctor had had an appointment cancellation this afternoon at 3:15. [Talk about co-instants! Otherwise it would have been three weeks or more!] My reply when she told me: “Perfect.”
So he scoped me Monday in the office and didn’t find the source of the bleed, and I had a CT on Tuesday. The former didn’t reveal anything about kidneys, but the latter is pretty definitive for kidney cancer. That is something particular to this affliction – a biopsy is not really needed, I guess. I don’t know anything about size/stage or grade yet, but I expect to be asking next week.
The very first thing I read [after clicking on the first online search result] when looking for info online was, “Your doctor has just told you that you have kidney cancer. Your mind whirls with emotion. Your spouse begins to cry.” Jeanne and I have both failed. [My mind wasn’t whirling with emotion and Jeanne did not begin to cry. We trust our Father. What he does is good – good for me, even if it is hard, and good for his name and honor, which is my desire more than my comfort.]
Our times are in his hands [Psalm 31:15], and that’s a good thing.
Bro’ Dale.//
*Joy & Strength is a classic daily devotional that my mom, my sister and I used to read regularly. I don’t read it regularly so much any more, but it was within arm’s reach after the busy signal on the phone.
8/1/17. Right radical nephrectomy – only 22 days from phone call to surgery, sooner than I otherwise might have been able to get even a first appointment!
Of course, I have reflected on that verse and its meaning, “‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
One of the things that power means is the ability not to be afraid. Ever. In ALL circumstances, including sickness and death. “You can’t kill a Christian, all that you can do is change his address.” The most frequent mandate in the Bible is “Don’t be afraid” or one of its several variations – “Be anxious for nothing”, “Fret not”, and others. So it is the power to obey that mandate, and the power to obey it gladly. It means to be glad and cheerful no matter what the circumstances, even cancer. Father is in control and whatever he does is good for both of us. The doctor and his office and nursing staff and the hospital have never had a more cheerful nephrectomy patient.
Studying a little further, I discovered that the “rest” is to rest as in a dwelling. So that means that the power is the strength of God over me as a strong shelter.
As I quipped on Facebook, “My only complaint about my recent surgery to remove a kidney was that, while he was in there moving furniture around to gain access, he failed to leave me with six-pack abs. THAT was a total failure! ”
A kind of funny and a co-instance footnote to the kidney account, showing that I was being taken care of in another way, too:
My recovery at home was so free of pain that I did not take ANY of the prescribed analgesic, Norco 10mg, an opioid. I was distinctly uncomfortable more than once, but never in severe pain at all, so that extra-strength Tylenol was all that I ever took. (I did look up the street value of the Norco, though, both here and in Omaha. 
)
But three months later, the week of Thanksgiving, I caught a relatively bad cold. I have had worse coughs, in that they were deeper and harder coughs, but I had never before had a cough like the one with this cold – I just could not stop coughing. I was coughing continuously and cough drops were not helping at all. I knew I needed a heavy duty cough suppressant if I going to get any sleep, and we did not have any codeine cough syrup. It was Wednesday night before Thanksgiving about 10:30, and there would have been easy way to get any.
I knew I had the Norco, so I looked on online for what the codeine content of a prescription cough syrup was, and it was exactly the same as the Norco, 10mg! So I was able to sleep, and was thankful!
Is the death of the other hundred people also attributed to God, and their purposes were all complete?
How is your record of co-instants different from what it would be if you just noticed all the coincidences in your life and forgot about all the much greater number of non-coincidences? This is magical thinking and ignorance of how to determine probabilities. It might make you feel good, perhaps even special, but it’s an abandonment of reason.
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Isn’t modern medical care amazing? Thank all the medical professionals from Hippocrates onward for developing the tools and techniques to keep a person with kidney cancer living longer. This is results of years of human initiative, creativity, and empathy. Modern medical science is responsible for keeping us alive and healthy longer than any God nor anyone’s prayers. If you really want to help someone support affordable healthcare for all.
We may not “need” them—but literary genres, metaphors, and literary outline devices (such as using the days of the week) are always within an author’s toolkit for conveying themes, emotions, and detailed concepts.
Why don’t history textbooks just say, “The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution” and everything grew from there—instead of describing so many details about American history? Why didn’t Shakespeare just write summaries of his ideas instead of long plays? Why didn’t Richard Dawkins just write “I don’t think God exists” instead of that long and ponderous The God Delusion? Yes, I suppose Genesis 1 could have been reduced to just the first verse (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”) but the author(s) had much more to say about it.
“Created in an instant” and a six-YOM outline describing various aspects of the created world are not incompatible. I could also say about my family’s history that “My earliest ancestor sailed from England to the Colonies in 1632 and the family multiplied from that point on” or I can give a lot more details about how my family of American ancestors came to be.
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You sound like a YEC! 
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No, it’s not. It says “And God said…” Some translations say “Then”, a clear (not contorted!) indication that something preceded it.
Your confirmation bias is hard at work.
I agree, except about the God part, and you conveniently ignored the timing aspects, of which there were multiple.
I’ve often wondered how much the Hollywood movie versions of the Genesis account have helped to create the popular assumption that “Let there be light!” was the first creative act. (And I can certainly understand why the screenwriters and directors though that “Let there be light!” was a more dramatic and cinematic place to start. After all, if they had tried to depict the previous verse, “And the Spirit God moved upon the face of the waters.”, it just wouldn’t have been the same impact.")
“Let there be light!” also introduces great opportunities for rousing orchestrations.
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Remeber the piece above about naturalism being self-refuting, and my comment with it?
https://carm.org/naturalism-is-self-refuting
You can engage in your fallacies of incredulity, but… that doesn’t make them true.
Maybe you didn’t read Timely RVs. Please calculate the probabilities for me:
docs.google.com/file/d/0B5k4bRhd7XlpWURaSzV6UHg3YTA/edit?usp=docslist_api&filetype=msword