How anyone can read Genesis 1 and get anything other that a literal six day creation is truly amazing.
Genesis 1:3-5 (ESV)
[sup]3 [/sup]And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. [sup]4 [/sup]And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. [sup]5 [/sup]God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
Genesis 1:8 (ESV)
[sup]8 [/sup]And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
Genesis 1:13 (ESV) [sup]
13 [/sup]And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
Genesis 1:19 (ESV)
[sup]19 [/sup]And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.
Genesis 1:23 (ESV)
[sup]23 [/sup]And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.
Genesis 1:31 (ESV)
[sup]31 [/sup]And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Genesis 2:1-3 (ESV)
[sup]1 [/sup]Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. [sup]2 [/sup]And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. [sup]3 [/sup]So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
Exodus 20:11 (ESV)
[sup]11 [/sup]For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
Jesus condemned the religious leaders for their inability to effectively reason on the Scriptures on more than one occasion. For example, their unwillingness to recognize Jesus as the Messiah despite the evidence that the time period for his arrival had now come, as seen at Daniel 9:24, 25, whereby it says that "there are seventy weeks that have been determined upon your people and upon your holy city, in order to terminate the transgression, and to finish off sin, and to make atonement for error, and to bring in righteousness for times indefinite, and to imprint a seal upon vision and prophet, and to anoint the Holy of Holies. And you should know and have the insight [that] from the going forth of [the] word to restore and to rebuild Jerusalem until Mes·si´ah the Leader, there will be seven weeks, also sixty-two weeks." On the other hand, many sincere common individuals, upon hearing or seeing him, said: "This is not perhaps the Christ, is it?"(John 4:29) The "sixty-nine weeks" of years (or 483 years, from the time when king Artaxerxes gave the word to Nehemiah in 455 B.C.E., Neh 2:5) came in 29 C.E.when Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.
Hence, Jesus told the religious leaders: "When evening falls you are accustomed to say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is fire-red’; and at morning, ‘It will be wintry, rainy weather today, for the sky is fire-red, but gloomy-looking.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but the signs of the times you cannot interpret."(Matt 16:2, 3) The Pharisees and Sadducees were averse to examining the Scriptures in order to understand that the arrival of the Messiah had now come, as also seen at Malachi 3:1 (and John 5:39), in which Jesus is called "the messenger of the covenant." Thus, Jesus arrival as the Messiah or Christ in 29 C.E. was not discerned by the religious leaders.
So likewise of yourself, for had you more closely analyzed the Scriptures without bias or prejudice, allowing the Bible to speak for itself rather than imposing a personal viewpoint (like putting a square peg in a round hole), it could be readily apparent that the word "day" can mean from a period of about twelve hours to several thousands years.
For instance, at Genesis 8:22, God says: "For all the days the earth continues, seed sowing and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, will never cease.” The word "day" (Hebrew yom) here is only about twelve hours long (see also Lev 8:35), whereas at Genesis 1, the word "day" is a much longer time period, thousands of years and the use of the word "day" at Genesis 2:4 encompasses the entire time period of the "history of the heavens and the earth in the time of their being created."
Thence, the word "day" in the Bible can be seen as the daylight hours, to twenty four hours, to several thousand years long, as in the six "creative" days in Genesis 1. The apostle Paul helps provide us with the length of a "creative" day by explaining that God's "seventh day" was still ongoing in his time, some four thousand years later from the creation of Adam and Eve in 4026 B.C.E., saying concerning God's resting on the "seventh day": "Therefore, since a promise is left of entering into his rest, let us fear that sometime someone of you may seem to have fallen short of it.....For in one place he has said of the seventh day as follows: “And God rested on the seventh day from all his works,” and again in this place: “They shall not enter into my rest. Since, therefore, it remains for some to enter into it, and those to whom the good news was first declared did not enter in because of disobedience."(Heb 4:1, 4-6)
Therefore, in Paul "day" (and even you would recognize that here the word day is longer than twenty four hours), Jehovah God's "rest" on the "seventh day"(Gen 2:1-3) was still in effect, allowing obedient individuals "to enter into it” when Paul wrote the book of Hebrews in about 61 C.E. And it must also be remembered that the closing expression of “and there came to be evening and there came to be morning” has not been applied to the “seventh day” yet. So, how long is God’s “rest” or the “seventh day” (and each "creative" day) ? Obviously, more than twenty four hours long, but several thousand years.