re: Why do you say that 2:
You said:
"To say that god created the universe is one thing, it might even be true. To point out which days of the week it happened is a stretch."
It must have been as easy to misunderstand what others said or wrote in the past as it is today.
Let's take a close look at what is written in Genesis 1:1 to 1:2. (King James version.)
Genesis = The initial stage of a developmental process.
"In the beginning", now ask your self: beginning of what.
It has been proven by scientific means that the planet Earth was not the first thing to appear in the universe, that seems to me to be one good reason to believe that what is being written about is not the creation of the planet Earth but something that is fundamental to everything in the universe and that includes the "mass" that the planet Earth is composed of.
I would say that this "earth" was some constituent of ordinary mass, it was not ordinary mass because ordinary mass is associated with "energy", in chapter 1:2 it says that this "earth" was without form and void.
All mass that we can study today has some "form" and definitely is not "void," in other words, this first ingredient was some type of a "protomass" out of which the actual mass is constructed.
Now as for the length of the "Day, C,1:5, remember that at this point in the explanation it is still talking about "the initial stage of a developmental process," there is no reference to a planet or its rotation, in other words this "Day" and this "Night" are fundamental functions of the universe. The planet Earth does not exist at this stage of development.
Notice also that after the first mention of the word "Night" it is not mentioned again, only the words evening and morning are mentioned.
The way I understand this explanation is that in the beginning of the universe there was space and "protomass" that compressed to create the first and the biggest of the big bangs, the big bang created the "light" and therefore made the "Day," after this stage there were other smaller compressions and "big bangs" of the "protomass" that created the galaxies, those are considered as the subsequent "Days" and the beginning of the solar systems would fit into the same sequence of "Days."
Such "Days" are long enough for evolution to occur.
So, according to my understanding, we exist in the seventh "Day" of creation.
There is no mention of the "week," that must be a later invention.
I do not consider my self as a "fundamentalist" and I would not "fight" with anyone that disagrees with my views, and I am interested in knowing how you and others interpret the writing in Genesis from 1 to 10, and why you interpret it that way.
You might want to look at the version here also: http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0101.htm