How old is the earth? Debate.

ErinLeigh wrote: Second point: (I learned this at an evangelical college (gasp) but I think it's the best way to look at the topic). To understand anything in scripture, we have to understand the people who wrote it and try to understand why they wrote it. Whether or not a god created the earth was not something that people of Moses' day debated - it was taken for granted that some divine being(s) made the earth and mankind. Moses' wrote the creation story to answer the "which god?" question. The story is written as poetry (Hebrew version, not Western european version) so it probably should not be taken literally. All of the created things mentioned were worshipped by various people groups in the area that the Israelites were going to come in contact with (for example, the Sun-god of the Egyptians, Ra). Moses point is this "Worship YHWH, because he created all of these other things that you might be tempted to worship. Look at the sun, the moon, the plants, the animals - God made all of these, don't be so stupid as to worship the created being, worship the creator." Paul uses the same argument, and I believe Isaiah did too. It's fairly well precedented in the Bible as a whole, so it shouldn't surprise us here. Since that is the point that Moses was making, we should not feel compelled to mold the account into our own debate over whether the earth was made in 6 days or a couple billion years. Because that's not Moses' point at all.