In his second epistle to the various Churches in Asia Minor, Peter writes: “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” In Genesis we read: On the first day He said “Let there be light,” and there was light. On the second day God separated the water under the vault from the water above it. On the third say he let the ground appear and the land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit, with seed in it, according to their kinds.
On the fourth day God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. On the fifth day God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.
On the sixth day God created mankind in his own image, male and female. He said “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it — I give every green plant for food.”
By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. Now I've summarized these passages to underscore that there was a sequence, these were “days” of epochal significance, Genesis was prose for creativity over time.
Now in light of this I must say that it frosts my petunias whenever I hear any debate, between believers and non-believers framed as one of Creation versus Evolution. That clearly suggests a misunderstanding of just what is meant by the word 'evolution'. In Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, evolution was defined, in the 1828 edition, as a noun stemming from the Latin term evolutio, which meant "The act of unfolding or unrolling." In the very first definition offered, he wrote "A series of things unrolled or unfolded; as the evolution of ages."