And on a similar note, the original word in Genesis translated into the English word "day" actually meant "a period of time". Not necessarily 24 hours. So that means God didnt necessarily create the universe in 144 earth hours before he rested like we are taught in sunday school.
Language is funny that way.
Ah, the day / period theory.
That makes even worse sense than one day if you try and reason it out as if days are really XXX years. Then you have these huge gaps and things... too messy. I'm not away of any serious theologian that holds to that view.
As far as I'm concerned, Genesis 1 is a literary device written to prehistoric Israelites to understand the concept of a singular God who made everything and is in charge of everything; it's a framework to hang on solid theology. This is a lot of modern theologians are. And actually a lot of past ones. AFAIK, the hard core six day view is more of a twentieth century phenomenon.
Our Western Protestant minds can't seem to wrap our heads around the notion that the Bible, while written for us, was written to us. It doesn't always tell us all we want to hear.
6 days, 6 billion years, or 6 nanoseconds - doesn't matter. God created it all on his own.
If it did tell us what we what to hear on all the debates, there would be a 32nd chapter of Proverbs where Solomon would extol the virtues of pineapple on pizza and how it leads to godliness.