I think the words, "God said let there be... and there was" are pretty straightforward.
You are approaching this from what you deem to be intuitively the case rather than what is logically necessary or logically possible. You may have a vivid idea in your mind, visualizing how God created things, but that feeling you have is not a good measure of what is logically necessary or logically possible.
Psalm 33:6-9... By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, their starry host by the breath of His mouth... He spoke, and it was...
This is again a description of cause and effect but it does not indicate method. You could assume this is talking about spontaneous creation, you could also assume that there is an unmentioned process that ties the start and finish together. You could leave assumptions behind and accept that both interpretations are possible.
At some point, you either have to accept that something was formed from nothing - or believe that physical things which are not of God's making have existed from eternity along with God.
Creatio ex nihilo isn't an issue for theistic evolution models. Even models like the 'Big Bang' are only able to project backward in time to a certain point. The 'Big Bang' model only points to the beginning of the Universe as it is thought to exist from its current cosmological makeup. If there is an atheist evolution proponent trying to convince you that the Big Bang is necessarily the beginning and nothing came before it, they aren't being true to what the Big Bang model is actually expressing (they are adding assumptions).
If we look at model quantum physics models, matter is thought to be an emergent property basically from an omnipresent formless 'thing' or a 'nothing' that is described in different ways.
We could speculate that the 'thing' that everything emerged from was the breath of God which if it is considered part of God, always existed.
There's different ways to take the creatio ex nihilo and prime mover conversation, but I don't personally see a problem with seeing it either way (creation from nothing or creation from something that always existed). The point of the conversation about evolution isn't even necessarily about the starting conditions, it's about the method between "God commanded" and "it was done" in the case of life and the physical world.
So if your only viable option is that something was at some point formed from nothing, then why not just accept the only logical and most straightforward understanding of, "He spoke, and it was"?
Even if we come to the conclusion that there were necessarily a case of spontaneous creation that does not mean that all other instances of creation would be necessarily spontaneous as well. Even if we establish creatio ex nihilo for the initiation of the universe that would still have no bearing on whether or not evolution was used as a mechanism to create life later on. God's use of supernatural mechanisms does not mean that God could never use natural mechanisms.
it's abundantly clear that the only reason you have to question the only logical and most straightforward understanding is that you have heard stories from flawed men
My point is that spontaneous creation is not the only logical understanding. You may find that interpretation to be the most intuitive or straightforward to you, but that does not speak to what is logically possible or necessary.
If you are familiar with "logos", "pathos", and "ethos", you are presenting a pathos argument whenever you appeal to "straightforwardness" without a deeper context. Your "flawed men" comment is an ethos argument. I am suggesting we approach this from logos... and especially from Logos if you understand what I mean.
You act as if the two statements I made contradict each other. They don't.
Consistency from the context of logic is the absence of contradiction. If something is logically inconsistent, it is not logically possible. If nothing is impossible with God, it follows that He can create things in any logically possible way. That includes spontaneous creation but also includes the use of natural processes such as evolution (unless either method is specifically ruled out).
The concept of evolution is consistent with the evidence (scriptural and empirical) even if we later decided it were uncompelling.
So again I challenge you to offer any SCRIPTURAL support for billions of years or evolution. Can you do that?
So beyond there being no contradiction with evolution, some scriptural concepts that tie into a Christian evolution model are 1) that God decides random events such as lots or dice rolls which ties into a concept of God-guided evolution. And 2) that Job was born from a womb and also created which ties in with creation via natural processes.
The very concept and word "day" (Hebrew yowm) was created by God. It refers to a single light/dark cycle on earth
Except it isn't. There were days before the sun and moon; Gen 2:4's 'day' of creation refers to several of the creation days; Psalm 90:4 also uses day to refer to something other than 24h periods; the length of the day was independent of the sun when the sun stood still in the sky in Joshua 10:13.
"Day" does not necessarily mean 24 hours. And because of passages like Psalm 90:4 it is necessarily the case that "day" does not always refer to 24 hours.
