As a younger Individual I was fine with a 7 day creation and was quite content with God accomplishing things in that manner.
I still am but in the intervening years I have done many 1000's of hours of geological and other fieldwork.
There is a record written in the rocks and fossils and now being discovers in genomes, that reveals a very consistent picture.
I am also fine with the eternal superseding the temporal however it is my opinion that the temporal and physical is modeled after the eternal and the spiritual and that by studying the temporal and physical we can gain further insights into the spiritual and eternal.
Sacred writ and practice is filled with Forms, Shadows, Symbols, and Types.
I find great benefit in looking at things uncovered by science through the lens of Forms, Shadows, Symbols, and Types and visa versa.
Do you acknowledge the Flood and its effect on the geological and fossil evidence? I think that plays a big part in many peoples misunderstanding or interpretation of the timelines.
amen @pretradition
The geology is different the atmosphere is different due to the flood.
During creation, there was an extra layer of water vapour wrapping around the world, this was released from the heavens during the great flood and it changed our atmosphere where previously the world was more like a green house and greenery grew in abundance which fed large animals such as dinosaurs!
And please... I hope nobody will ask how do you fit a big dinosaur into an ark! God is wise, the animals that were placed on the ark were juveniles with their lives still ahead of them and therefore they were small in stature!
Also note, the animals were brought into the ark by God not by man and the animals were classed as clean and unclean. So let it be noted for the record that clean and unclean meat was provided by God before there was any Israelite.
The flood seems to be backed up by a few things:
1-Almost every culture has a flood story in written or picture form.
2- Fossil locations -- This one is very interesting to me since when I was younger we went to a place in Nevada called Fossil Mountain that is well over 5000 feet above sea level and there were a ton of fish fossils on the top of the mountain. It is a small crater where it would appear that water levels rose above it and then due to the concentration of fossils there were many fish and other animals trapped in the crater when the water level dropped back down.
The devastation of the Flood (which i believe was world wide) made changes in the earth that would take millions of year to normally happens. like the gran cayon in Arizona just to mention one. in the formation of the earth there were process acceleration. just like the creation of man. God made a grown man that at age of one had the characteristic of a man of 30 probably. same happened to the earth.
You still have to contend with the Israelites understanding of the Sabbath. I can understand if you were or are confused about it being a 7 day 24-hour period of time. But the Israelites had no confusing on this matter. They understood perfectly that the 7th day Sabbath was a literal day of 24 hours.
Also, are you essentially trying to introduce the idea of "reason?" That it's more "reasonable" that it happened over millions of years vs 7 days?