6 literal days or 16 billion years. Who is it who is reducing God to an image a human can manage?
No one on either side of the “in house” debate between Christians on this issue discounts the eternity of God as awesome beyond imagination. But time is just time. If you have a lot of it, does that give God more credit? Less. Neutral? I say neutral. What young earth creationists are unwilling to do is put God in a box either way. If God wanted to intervene creatively at any ratio of time to effect, He is not limited by anything but His own desire to create.
Therefore, His own statements on the matter must be given greater deference than any system of thought which would either limit him or render him unnecessary to the process. He could create over 16 trillion gazillion years if He so chose. Or he could create in units of time so small we cannot even imagine them. The point is, He *chose* to create over a six day period, and that appears to be, not because of any limitation on Him, but for our benefit, for us to have a pattern of worship that was suitable for *our* limitations.
So the burden of proof has to be, if God inspired Scripture, and the inspired writer used the ordinary term for day, then that must be what God meant to say, and what He meant for us to understand, unless some justification, not from the hobbled and half blind notions of human science, but from the text itself, would warrant a more abstract meaning for the term. And in other places such justification may be found. But not here.