jlay wrote:Here is an honest question. (and it cuts both ways.)
How many people who fall under the OEC are themselves actually familiar with the positions enough to defend them in any intellectual manner?
(Yes, I know we don't know all OECers, and I know we could ask the same of YEC.)
Regarding those who are not. How many hold to OEC not because of reasonable biblical defense but simply because of the pressures of not complying to what is promoted in the secular science community?
Well, Day-Age OECs don't accept evolution when it comes to life's diversity that we see. If influenced entirely by secular science, then it would appear odd why Day-Age proponents stop short.
Furthermore, a strict YEC interpretation is largely something that originated 17th century and largely popularised via the Scofield Reference Bible.
Of days, we have some of the following writings on Genesis creation days from various early Christian theologians:
Irenaeus said: Thus, then, in the day they eat, in the same did they die... For it is said, "There was made in the evening, and there was made in the morning one day." Now in this same day that they did eat, in that also did they die. ... On one and the same day on which they ate they also died (for it is one day of creation)... He (Adam) did no overstep the thousand years, but died within their limit... for since "a day of the Lord is as a thousand years," he did not overstep the thousand years, but died within them."
Augustine wrote in the 'The City of God': "As for these 'days,' [Genesis creation days] it is difficult, perhaps impossible to think let alone explain in words what they mean."
In 'The Literal Meaning of Genesis' Augustine writes: "But at least we know that it [the Genesis creation day] is different from the ordinary day with which we are familiar."
Elsewhere in the same book he writes: Seven days by our reckoning after the model of the day of creation, make up a week. By the passage of such weeks time rolls on, and in these weeks one day is constituted by the course of the sun from its rising to its settings; but we must bear in mind that these days indeed recall the days of creation, but without in any way being really similar to them.
Origen also wrote of the first six days as representing the time of work for men, and the seventh (Sabbath) day, lasting the full duration of the world: He [Celsus] knows nothing of the day of the Sabbath and rest of God, which follows the completion of the world's creation, and which lasts during the duration of the world, and in which all those will keep festival with God who have done all their works in their six days, and who, because they have omitted none of their duties will ascend to the contemplation (of Celestial things) and to the assembly of righteous and blessed beings.
Thus, the belief the the days of Genesis 1 were longer than a standard 24-hour day existing long before modern science emerged.
We are still ridiculed for being Christians, ridiculed for being silly enough to try to believe in the flying spaghetti monster. And still get God of the Gaps thrown in our faces. 
