Actually, I take “God said” to be a central point of Gen 1. When people say that their only important takeaway from Gen 1 is “God did it,” I scratch my head. I wonder how they divorce the saying from the doing, given how the text repeatedly emphasizes this connection - and all the more so when you consider everything else the Bible says about God speaking. I would expect the minimum meaning any reader would glean from Gen 1 - if he were looking for a minimum - would be “God did it by speaking.”
As to your point about “nobody with ears were around to hear,” I don’t consider human beings to be the only beings. Therefore, just because there were no human beings around to hear God’s words does not mean that no beings heard them. What the equivalent of “verbalized literal audible words” is in the spiritual realm, I do not know; but it’s clear from the Scriptures that angels hear God speak.
I don’t see how the application of the original pattern of seven to longer periods of time disallows the possibility that the original pattern was in days. Does the application to weeks of years disallow the application to years?
For readers who take Gen 1 as a seven-day week, the answer is obvious.
See here.
I am in search of just such an interpretation which I can in good conscience accept. Hence I wrote the OP that launched this thread.