Pastor Doug Wilson has posted his Theses on the Age of the Earth. He is a young Earth proponent, but most of his theses are less about the age of the earth and more about how the debate should be framed, which I agree with. In that spirit and frame, I’ve offered these points, which I think most succinctly summarize my scriptural basis for an old earth:

1. I have yet to hear a non-circular definition of “day” for the first few days that pin the time of them to our modern 24 hours. Isn’t the definition of a day generally one earth rotation? So any amount of time could exist before God decides to set the Earth’s spin in motion, and the telescopes could honestly be telling us the age of the stars by our modern definitions of time, i.e. days one and two could have been that 13.8 billion years without violating even conventional definitions.
2. “Day” is one of the few terms in the entire Bible that God is actually vague about, and tells us such: Not only are we told that to God a day is a thousand years and a thousand years a day, but terms of “day of the Lord” or “day of judgement” are used all over the place to mean something more like “moment in time/epoch”.
3. Those who insist that the term “Day” must conform to a literal modern 24 hour one-earth rotation definition suddenly get fuzzy with definitions of “death” when God tells Adam and Eve that they’ll die the day they eat of the tree. One has to interpret “death” on the day they ate of the tree as “spiritual death and an introduction of physical death into the world,” since their physical deaths were years after they ate the fruit. Why is death the term subject to interpretation, rather than the term “day”, which God specifically says is the relative term – see #2?

Overall, the only last point I have, which I did not send along to Pastor Wilson, is a rebuttal to his theses point (I believe the last one) that God could have created the universe with the light from the stars already in motion. I agree God could have – but I disagree that God would have. I believe that all creation sings of God’s character, and because his character is honest, they do so honestly.