Even with a rather literal reading, a number of assumptions and additional steps of logic are needed to assign an age to the earth. To me, the more direct and supportable conclusions a literal reading gives are a six day creation, the absence of death before the fall of man, and the creation of man and woman at the beginning of creation.
Understanding the conflicts between these aspects of a literal reading of the Biblical texts with modern secular consensus is not a task for a few sentences in an internet forum. Send me an email request, and I'll send along the 10 page paper my wife and I co-authored on the topic some time back.
Michael_Courtney@alum.mit.edu
The main points ideas center around two points:
1) The application of methodological naturalism assumes that the laws of nature are constant. Since miracles and supernatural events are assumed by the method not to occur, any claim that the method has invalidated a specific claim of a supernatural event (Biblical creation) has made a circular argument, which is a fallacy.
2) Operational science describes the laws of nature and is subject to the tests of repeatable experiment. Questions of what happened in the past are more properly questions of history rather than natural science. Redefining the subjects as science rather than history gives greater weight to a naturalistic interpretation of the physical evidence (with a method that assumes miracles do not occur) than to the eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence commonly admitted when questions are recognized as historical.
The 10 page paper is titled, "Faith and Science: Debunking the Myth that Science Disproves the Bible" and while it neither proves nor demands a literal interpretation of the Biblical texts regarding creation, it does present a framework which allows them to be preserved without any contradiction by secular consensus or modern science.