Hey man, thank you for providing clarity and everything. I totally feel where you’re coming from as I’ve just recently, since the beginning of the year, have given up the traditional view of creation in Genesis. It’s definitely been a journey. I remember first reading articles at Biologos and being shocked initially but they more I read and compared my views with what they were saying, it began to make sense to me. I’m still on this journey and of course has raised even more questions so I’m still working those things out.
With that being said, I’ll answer your questions in light of what helped me understand more. And as you said, my science-knowledge is sooooo limited so it definitely wasn’t the science that led me to look at Genesis differently. It was that I realized that my reading of Genesis 1-3 was wrong. It was my faithful commitment to read and interpret God’s word correctly, rather than science, that led me to this conclusion.
So, to your question of the biblical reasons to accept a super old earth, I would say there are none, explicitly at least. I say explicitly because knowing what we know about God in Scripture about how he’s faithful, takes his time, gets things done “consequentially”, etc, and even personally of life being a journey and we “evolve” in our lives and are shaped by life and God’s Spirit and his word, the process of the evolution of life as a whole doesn’t surprise me if that was God’s method of creation. But if you’re looking for a narrative or passage to say that “through billions of years God created the heavens and earth”, there is none. So brother, I think where you’re getting hung up at is your interpretation. You begin with the premise that Genesis 1-2 is telling us, literally-scientifically, how the universe came to be. And because you begin with that premise, you have the obstacles that you have. And understandably, that’s the view that I had always known and read about and also, a plain reading will give you that understanding. So the question then is this: how am I reading the creation narrative wrong? So lets see instead of what the bible says, what it doesn’t say.
Biblical interpretation. What’s the proper way to interpret the Bible? Four questions that are important in correct interpretation. What is the genre? What is the context? What is the author intending to say? How would the audience have understood it? Think of when Jesus is talking about the prodigal son. Did that father and son exist? No. But a plain reading will give that impression. But understanding that it’s a parable, we look at the passage differently. Not analogizing the two, but just showing why genre and stuff is important. With that being said, lets go to Genesis 1. The very first sentence, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Now what does that mean? Our traditional view, we’ve always read it synonomously as "God created the entire universe. But is that what it says literally? And were the ancient readers who read this understand it as that? Not at all. A quick context glance, you’ll see that the author is referring to the “sky” (as in the blue thing when you look up) and the “land” (what we walk on instead of the globe/planet. (Also, those hebrew words mean sky and land. Also, there was no concept of the vast outer space, billions of galaxies and planets so there were no ancient hebrew words to describe such.) It helped to understand too that the first verse is a summary of the following verses. Something like, “in the beg, God created the heavens (sky) and the earth (land), this is how he did it…The earth was formless and empty…”. Apart from that the Hebrew words is referring to the sky that we look up and see and the land that we walk on, the context gives us clues. In 1:10, God calls the dry land “earth” and in 1:8 he calls the “expanse” sky (where the birds fly). So by taking this as a scientific literal account, we would have to conclude that it only tells us God created the sky above and the ground we walk on. Adding to that, this “expanse” refers to a hard, domelike structure. The NRSV translates the word as dome and I think that’s the proper translation. The ancients believed the sky was a dome (it does look like it) that held back water (I mean it is blue) and had windows or “floodgates” (literally "lattice-windows; Gen 7:11) that would let that water fall down (oh that explains rain). And this makes sense of the separation of “waters above” from “waters below” in 1:6-7.
So looking at that, I concluded ohhhh ok I’ve been imposing my own modern, scientific views on to this and have been making it say something that it doesn’t say. And this realization can be scary, because now a person can say (like a friend told me), well isn’t the bible wrong? The sky isn’t a dome holding back an ocean, but yet it says that God created one. And if Genesis is meaning to give a literal, science-factual account of how creation came to be, then that conclusion, of the bible being wrong, would be correct. But it’s not that the bible is wrong, it’s that our interpretation is wrong. So what is it saying then?
Another question I forgot to add to the questions of correct interpretation is “why is the author writing”. In the NT, it’s often easy to see why the author is writing. Luke wants to let Theophilus know what’s going on, Paul is having issues with the Corinthian church, etc. But why is the author of Genesis writing? It’s not easily derived from the text but compared to other ancient writings at the time, it seems like that Genesis is a polemic to other ancient creation accounts at that time. Genesis is theological and it tells about the God of Israel, and the people of Israel. And that theme runs through the whole bible. Some quick examples, instead of the world coming into shape via a pantheon of spiteful, war-stricken gods, Genesis declares that one sovereign God made all there is. Instead of the sky, sun, moon, and sea being gods needing to be served by humans, Genesis declares that these are only creations by the one true God to serve human beings. And also notice that the author uses the words “greater light” and “lesser light” instead of the ancient hebrew words for sun and moon. Apparently to furthermore say that they aren’t gods. Instead of humans being created by the gods to be their slaves and do their duties, Genesis declares that Yahweh created human beings in his image, as his royal representatives who don’t provide god’s needs (he has none) but that one true God provides needs for humans.
Sorry to make this so long, but these few things and a lot more has helped me to see that my interpretation of the passage was wrong and that the author wasn’t revealing scientfic discoveries that wouldn’t be known until thousands of years later. But was rather using their own ancient, cultural understandings to tell about their god and themselves. And this is what the truth of the matter is, the theologicals rather than the scientific. So to answer your question, I would say there are no biblical passages to describe scientifically the age of the earth, old or young. Just like the bible doesn’t tell us about how to make a car, or why we have fingernails, the ancient inspired writers’ intention wasn’t that. It’s a story about Yahweh and his people. So the reason I’m open to evolutionary creation is because I’ve concluded what the bible ISN’T saying and I trust the people here at Biologos about the scientfic evidence of evolution. So it’s not even that you have to jump from 6 days, to evolution. Just continue with your conviction to want to interpret God’s word correctly. Hope this helps and let me know if you have any questions and want any clarification to anything I’ve said. Blessings