There are several different ways that Bible-believing Christians attempt to harmonize the creation account in the Bible with the scientific evidence regarding nature. One of the major issues is the apparent old age of the earth, according to scientific evidence, as opposed to the apparent young age of the earth, according to the Bible. The following theories are examples of suggested ways of reconciling this apparent conflict.
1) Some propose that the "days" of the Genesis account were really long periods of time. Among these theologians, some suggest that the process of "evolution" really happened much the way evolutionist scientists propose, but that God programmed creation to follow this process. Others believe that along the way, in certain moments, God created each species directly and miraculously.
2) Others believe the "days" of the Genesis account were literal 24 hour days, but that there were long periods of time between them.
3) Others propose that there was a "gap" of many years between the initial creation and the moment when God began creating the animals, vegetation, and man.
4) Some believe that the Genesis account does not pretend to give the chronological order of creation, or the age of the earth. Rather, the Genesis account is a "literary framework" to display God's acts of creation, according to one view, or an "analogy" between God's work and man's work," according to another view.
5) Still others believe that God miraculously made all things with the appearance of age. In this group, some suggest that since all of nature is interdependent and "irreducibly complex," it all needed to exist as fully developed, and it all needed to exist together around the same time.
