Here is a quotation from an excellent book on this subject - "Aeons - the search for the beginning of time" by Martin Gorst:
"Sometimes the past is nearer than you think. The other day, out of curiosity, I opened my grandmother's Bible, and there, printed alongside the opening verse of Genesis, was the date for the beginning of the world - 4004 B.C. ...
What surprised me was that anyone should still be proclaiming this as fact as recently as the twentieth century. My grandmother's Bible was printed in 1901. Surely everyone knew by then that the world was older than this?"
Now, what the witnesses have done is to abandon the literal creative days in favor of their fabrication that each day was 7000 years. It is their own private fantasy - not scriptural by any stretch, and certainly just as laughable as 4004 B.C.
I think that hanging on to such crap beliefs are in fact much more damaging to real faith than a careful scientific approach. The reason? Well - think what happens to the faith of the "true believers" in such stuff when they suddenly come across clear evidence that it was all just a religious fantasy.