Terry,
Six day creation was not always such a strong belief in the church. It is partly a reaction to losing ground to science generally. A kind of intellectual siege mentality by the church.
?St. Augustine was a kind of evolutionist, although hardly a Darwinist. In his second commentary on Genesis, written around the year 410, he speculated that God had planted "rational seeds" in nature which eventually fructified into plants and animals. This would be evolution in the strict meaning of the word, an unfolding of what is already there, like an acorn turning into an oak. Being directed and purposeful, however, St. Augustine's version of evolution is utterly non-Darwinian: it is, rather, creation on the instalment plan.?
This was not an uncommon view. They understood the text better and believed that it was talking about long periods of time and not days ? it is certainly possible to understand the word ?yowm? not as a day, but as a period of time.
See:
http://www.accuracyingenesis.com/day.htmlI think the context of the quote was about a creative act. The steady state universe didn?t allow for it. The quote is about Creation Ex Nihilo ? which fits equally with Genesis?s reading and with current cosmological knowledge.
Blacknad.
