Italics are quotations from the most recent post of Anti-Babylon.
1) Your position on "creation time" that is not "providential time" is still completely confusing.
A providential day is the division of the diurnal cycle upon Earth into 24 units of the same length, commencing and ending at a point generally convenient to the adopting society. A providential day is also 7.942433849 * 10^14 vibrations of the Cessium-133 atom under suitable excitation, as adopted by international standards. A providential day is also the travel within a vacuum of a photon for 2.590206837 * 10^13 meters as commonly used by astronomy. Although differing in important respects, because applied in different situations, each of these "days" share three fundamental similarities: 1) They are all direct observations of physical motion. 2) They can all be divided into indefinitely small units which are objectively precisely the same, even if subjectively different. 3) They can be projected indefinitely into the future without fear of contradiction or embarrassment, because of time's predictable orderliness. (Theologically, the confidence in such projection may very well cease at the Second Coming.)
In Creation Day 1, time was the interaction of light and darkness, Day and Night. Time was also evening and morning of the first day. Time was, to that extent, less chaotic than it was at the beginning. In Creation Day 2, time was evening and morning also. Notice that this was not the evening and morning of the first day, but a new creation, specific to the second day and mutually supportive of the earlier morning-and-evening creation. In other words, God did not create morning and evening as a general concept applicable to any day, but specifically within and to each day. In Creation Day 3, time was the life cycle of grasses, herbs, and fruit trees. Time was also the morning and evening of the third day. In Creation Day 4, time was further ordered by the ordination of the heavenly bodies to rule and separate the Day and the Night. Time also was the creation of evening and morning specific to the fourth day. In Creation Day 5, time was the life cycle of the creatures of the sea and of the air, and evening and morning of the fifth day. In Creation Day 6, time was the life cycle of the beasts of the land and the life of man, and the evening and morning specific to the sixth day. Additionally, the Creator introduced the eternity of time future as the span of the soul of man. In Creation Day 7, the Creator pronounced the creation of time to have been completed, so we are to understand that the orderliness carefully and successively built into time during the creation week was to serve as a permanent model for providential time. This model was so important that it served as the justification for the Fourth Commandment, inscribed into the unchanging moral law.
2) What weaknesses have you even revealed here? From the beginning I have owned my unintentional lack of clarity.
I did not intimate that the six 24-hour day position was subject to the weakness of misinterpretation of Earth ages and uninterrupted uniformitarianism, but since you have raised the possibility, it may be interesting to pursue. I do not suggest that this doctrine is thus vulnerable, because of the specification of only six days. This is good, of course. However, I do note that the 24-hour part of it, considered by itself alone, is so vulnerable. This is especially true in light of the fact that this position is a bit vague on when and how the 24-hour schedule commenced. This leads to a conscious or unconscious tendency to extend this conception of time into the indefinite past (eons and uniformitarianism), but it also does not clarify that time was not coexistent with God in eternity past. Please note that I am not accusing the holders of this position of advocating or even holding any such heresy; I am merely pointing out that the preexistent 24-hour view of time is logically vulnerable at this juncture. I am also uneasy that the unchanging 24-hour essentially expunges the description of the creation of time from the creation narrative. I find this absence unlikely in light of the importance of orderly time in the life of man and of the essential historicity of the redemption narrative throughout Scripture.
I believe that the reason the 24-hour view is held by many Christians with such tenacity is that it forms a palisade against the encroachments of a Deistic view of providential Earth history and of macroevolution. When I hear this view defended these issues seem invariably to make an early entrance. This is good, of course, and the view is to be commended for taking such a stand. However, my view is that time was not completed in its comprehensive, orderly fullness until coincident with the completion of the fullness of the material universe. This precludes these two secular claims, because time cannot be extended prior to having been completed.
From where I sit, you have not yet cleared up how the shared interpretation of "day" is contributing to the current conflict between these 2 YEC groups.
My original hypothesis was that an unnecessarily rigid view of the schedule of creation interfered with a fuller view of crucial issues such as instantaneous vs. successive creation. However, since you decline to specify the relationship of your view of successive creation within the overarching 24-hour view, I withdraw my suggestion.
One of the reasons I do not hold to the 24-hour view is that it doesn't seem to aid a fuller understanding of creation.
