Prode, with all due respect, I don’t know if you realise this, but the guidelines of this forum clearly lay down some definitions of “gracious dialogue” which include the following:
Assuming legitimate Christian faith on the part of other commenters, unless they identify otherwise.
At no point have I ever self-identified as an atheist, nor have I ever claimed that God had nothing to do with it.
For what it’s worth, the claim that an ancient earth is an atheistic worldview is demonstrably untrue. Case in point: oil exploration. Geologists have to determine both the age and the thermal history of the rock strata in order to ensure that the oil deposits will be of a usable quality. Too young, or too cool, and they’re “premature” – still solid and impossible to get out of the ground. Too old, or too warm, and they’re “postmature” – uneconomical at best, and at worst baked into complete oblivion. They are under strong financial pressures to deliver results that are correct, not results that support their worldview. There is no room whatsoever for any kind of presuppositions, atheistic or otherwise, in oil exploration.
(For a more detailed explanation of this, see the article “Can Young-Earth Creationists Find Oil?” on the Age of Rocks blog. The author is a Christian geochronologist.)
As far as Exodus 20:8-11 is concerned, 2 Peter 3:8 and Psalm 90:4 say that a day with the Lord is as a thousand years and a thousand years are as a day. In other words, God’s days are not the same as our days. Placing young age constraints on the age of the earth quite clearly goes beyond what the Bible demands.
Ah, the good old “were you there?” argument. It’s true that you can’t go back into history to witness the creation of the heavens and the earth. But there’s one other, itsy, bitsy, tiny little detail: you can cross-check different studies to see whether they give the same results. It’s the whole principle of everything being established on the testimony of two or three witnesses.
In this case, there are hundreds of thousands of witnesses. Hundreds of thousands of studies from independent disciplines, whose assumptions are independent of each other, that provide a very close agreement for ages far in excess of six thousand years. On top of that, scientists can make other testable predictions to check whether their assumptions are valid or not. Again, there are vast numbers of such tests.
In any case, the “were you there?” argument would falsify the entire field of forensic science if it had any merit. If you could argue it convincingly, you would make a fortune as an expert witness in criminal defence cases.