If you count years by counting solar cycles, you cannot have it both ways. Solomon said the Sun is radiant and sets. And going to the place of him he is radiant again. Indeed, in the Solomon’s days, the Sun moved East through the stars of the ecliptic to rise next the same star again next year. Counting the circuit of the Sun cannot be billions and also 6,000.
On the other hand, the world can be very old yet only have orbited the Sun 6,000 times. How could that be? If you stop imagining that time exists, then you end up using the ancient system of the biblical prophets. All early people used nature’s changes to record when things happened, not time. Ancient calendars and clocks were not designed to measure time. They were dynamically adjusted to fit nature’s never ending changes. Early languages, like Biblical Hebrew, had no words for time or verb tenses to order events “in time.” If you check the text in the original languages, you will find that the Bible never once mentions a time continuum. The ancients monitored changes, not time. Time and change are diametrically opposite worldviews.
In the ancient worldview, the earliest days and years were eons and throughout earth history days and years keep shortening. See Genesis 47:9 where Jacob says the days and years of the son are shorter and worse than those of the fathers. The Bible repeatedly uses eon word for the Old Testament era. Eons were not time. They were how ponderously slow days and years were for the patriarchs.
For example, Job 14 lists six geological phenomena that corresponded to a lifetime in his days. He says man who is born of woman is of few days. Then he compares a lifetime to the Mediterranean (Hebrew word West) drying. Indeed, drill cores find a couple of hundred meters under the plankton oozes, hundreds of meters of rock salt. After the drill cores punch through the rock salt, gypsum and stromatolites, they find plankton oozes again. One drill core found cross bedded desert sands with dried ocean ooze, thousands of meters below the modern sea level. Two other of Job’s lifetime markers were “water wears away rocks and washes away the dust of the Earth.” Indeed, all around the Med we find that ancient river incised deep canyons as they rushed down to the desiccated Med. For example, the Russian engineer Ivan Chumokov drilled the Nile river bed for the foundation of the Aswan dam. He found that the ancient Nile canyon, a thousand kilometers from the sea, was 200 meters lower than the modern sea level. Just north of Cairo, the Nile canyon was 2500 meters deep, cut into rock. This is deeper than the Grand Canyon. Later, if filled the vast canyon up with silt to form a great delta. Job compared a lifetime to water washes away the dust of the Earth. Indeed, it sure does. Scientists estimate that the Mediterranean dried between 23 million and 5.3 million years ago. Job could not have lived more than 5300 biblical years ago. These are not contradictions in the ancient changing worldview.
https://www.livescience.com/42115-giant-salt-crisis-explained.html
Job ended his poem on the brevity of life by claiming their faces intensely continued to change until God takes them away. Indeed, if you lived long enough to watch the ocean dry, which we calculate as 18 million years, you too would grow thick Neanderthal brows from vast age in few years. The skull is the only part of our skeleton that keeps growing with age. Neanderthal child skulls look like those of modern children, but sometimes with wear on baby teeth as though they were octogenarians, in few years.
Change and time are diametrically opposite worldviews. We confirm the ancient worldview along with creation day four with the visible history of galaxies. The clocks and the orbits accelerate together as billions of galaxies become spreading things (raqiya) exactly as in the Hebrew text for day four.
The problem is not the literal biblical text. It is the historical foundational assumption upon which science was founded. The disciples of Friar Thomas built a great system of measuring on his metaphysic that matter is not continually changing itself. Even the definition of time and most mathematical measuring units were contrived on the scholastic metaphysics.
Yet we can see how the orbits and the clocks keep on accelerating as the properties of all matter keep shifting in the visible history of galaxies. Billions of galaxies, at many ranges, continue to become raqiya (spreading things). Of course what is visible violated the historical dogma upon which science was founded. This is certainly whey scientists invent incredible myths about invisible matter and vacuums that adjust the frequencies of passing light. They were trained to think using their definition of time that was built on the medieval metaphysics.
The Earth is incredibly ancient, exactly as the text repeatedly states. Yet we have only orbited the Sun a few thousand times because change is real and time is merely philosophy.
Victor