Jeff your posts all read either like propaganda (I’ve learned so much that confirms what I already believe, more and more support is added all the time, etc.), or an exercise in giving yourself excuses not to engage anyone (there’s too much to unpack, there are no undecided people here (e.g. everyone is closed-minded, except you ofc).
Why waste your time indeed.
I think part of the confusion in this thread is that not everyone here is arguing for either young‑earth creationism or gap theory. Some of us hold a simpler, text‑anchored view.
For example, I take Genesis 1:1 as the moment God created everything , the heavens, the earth, and all the raw material of the universe. Genesis 1:2 isn’t a ruined world; it’s simply describing the condition of the earth after that initial creation.
The way I picture it is like this: God plants a garden and lets it run on its own for a long time. Left alone, it becomes dark, wild, and unstructured, not “ruined,” just untended. That’s the state Genesis 1:2 is describing.
Then God steps in and takes six literal 24‑hour days to form, fill, and assign roles, essentially preparing the garden for human life.
This also explains the polemic element in Day 4. The text doesn’t say God created the sun and moon on Day 4; it says He gave them their functions, to rule the day and night, to mark seasons, days, and years. In the ancient Near East, the sun and moon were worshiped as gods. Genesis flips that: they’re not deities; they’re timekeepers. They serve God.
That fits the pattern we see earlier:
The point isn’t cosmology, it’s theology. God is the one who orders, assigns, and rules.
So yes, the six days are literal 24‑hour days, but they’re days of preparation, not the timeframe of the universe’s origin. The text never says Genesis 1:1 happened within those six days, which means natural history fits between v.1 and v.3 without contradicting the Hebrew.