1. GOD said, “Let there be light.” We know, today, that this occurred just about 13.8 billion years ago.
2. GOD tells us, in the Psalms, to view His wonders and majesty in the skies. We’ve gone there, and a) discovered that billions-of-years age, plus the fact that when the Word made everything that was made, He made so many stars that it takes at least a 24-digit number to express their total, and that Dark Matter / Dark Energy qualify as the “and unseen” part.
3. In I Kings 19:12 (or nearby) we hear “the still small voice of GOD” when Elijah emerges from the mountain cave, after the wind and earthquake and fire have passed by, GOD not being in any of them. I (yes, this is a reach) choose to view the 3.4 degree Kelvin background microwave radiation that comes from all points of the sky as that “still small voice,” even though the original Hebrew in I Kings used “silence.”
4. Quibbling with GOD over time spans and methods? JOB did that, too.
5. Genesis is in fact an “origin story.” What separates it from all other origin stories, and each ancient culture has at least one, is that it is crammed with GOD’s love, patience, forgiveness, authority, and mercy. No other origin story even comes close.
6. Quibbling with GOD over when and how He reveals Himself to us is the act of a child. Yes, we are to come unto Him after the manner of a child! But when that childishness wishes to hogtie GOD’s self-revelation to an origin story, and rejects dealing with what our minds have found, including the MOST AWESOME version of grandeur and lavish creation? That could never have been dealt with by Abraham and his contemporaries. So try not to quibble!!
7. Insisting on simplistic faith is good; insisting on simplistic facts is not good. It is in reality a tool Satan employs to make your testimony to the unchurched neither “stumbing block” nor “folly” but instead a granite wall. Deal with your unwitting refusal to share GOD’s truth by trying to pack it into something that violates His command that we learn about His Glories.
I’ll stop here. If this doesn’t provide an adequate explanation of how to read GOD’s word with a child’s heart but at the same time an adult’s knowledge of His VAST awesomeness, at least I have made the effort. The rest is up to you.
Peace and love, Joel
Oh, and Another Thing 