A catechism that refuses to refuses to deal with scientific reality is a sign of a church no longer in contact with the world, a church destined to grow less and less relevant to those to whom it should be reaching out.
Let’s assume that you are referring to the first creation account in Genesis.
I was reading an authoritative and scholarly Jewish commentary on Genesis and it puts the subject into its own context, not the modern broken-record context of evolution vs creation.
The Jewish perspective is how different this creation account is from other creation myths of its time period. Very briefly, the “seven day” aspect of the creation account, I would suggest, is not what we moderns are interpreting it to be, a literal astronomical 24-hour day x 7 account of creation.
The seven-day creation account is the standard metaphor for describing or doing anything important in Biblical times. Weddings were seven days, coronations were seven days, etc.
The seven-day account is a way of saying that creation was obviously a very important event. If God had created everything in the timeframe of a flashbulb burning, then it simply wouldn’t have been taken as seriously by the readers/listeners as a seven day account.
The analysts feel that the first account of creation in Gen 1:1 to 2:3a was written LATER than the creation account starting at Gen 2:3b. It’s not hard to see that the seven-day creation with its seventh day of “rest” is a template for the feast of the Sabbath to be established at a later time.
A lot of things in the Bible don’t make sense without the picture of things that we have in Gen 1:1 to 2:3.
God speaks seven times and it is so seven times. God judges the creation seven times and says it is good (or very good) seven times. And, according to the commentary, the Hebrew verses are either seven words each or a multiple of seven words.
So, as is often pointed out, “seven” is a Biblically important number that in whatever later context it occurs, it may be pointing back to creation, God’s plan, perfection, etc.
It’s good to “work” a Biblical text to see what’s there, but we ought to be open at all times to the inexhaustible source of divine inspiration.
An astronomical seven 24-hour days creation is almost an unimportant meaning of the creation account. It was probably NEVER meant to convey such a narrow idea, any more than “it’s raining cats and dogs” means that animals are falling out of the sky or “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse” means that I have my eye on some stallion.
