Happy Belated Birthday
6015 years ago last Tuesday, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. (Genesis 1:1-5)
We know the exact date thanks to the painstaking work of the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, James Ussher, who served in that role from 1626 until his death in 1656. Ussher did not reach this conclusion arbitrarily. A good deal of research was behind it, carefully laid out in his Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world.
Ussher was far from the first to set the date of creation. The Venerable Bede (673-735) set the date at 3952 BC. Johannes Kelper (1571-1630), the astronomer and astrologer, said the earth began on 3992 BC. Isaac Newton made it a round 4000 BC. Establishing the age of the earth was almost as much fun as debating how many angels could sit on the head of a pin. In other words, at roughly the same time that the Sumerians were inventing writing, the earth came into existence.
One of the key considerations in all of these dates is that the earth’s total life expectancy was thought to be 6000 years: four thousand before Christ and two thousand after. The earth and all that is in it were created in six days, and would be destroyed after six days, if one interprets “day” as did the author of the second letter of Peter: “one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”
Usher basically added up the lineages in the Bible, and where this information fell short, attempted to establish a link between the Bible and known historical dates from other sources, such as connecting the death of Nebuchadnezzar II to events in 2 Kings 25. Jesus had to be born sometime Before Christ, because history records that Herod the Great died in 4 BC. Ussher decided the first Nöel was in 5 BC.
A Gallup poll in 2008 found that 44% of US adults agreed with the statement "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." I find it hard to credit that number myself, but it’s still quite scary for anyone who believes in democracy. It says that a very large number of our fellow citizens believe that something written in the Bible outweighs physical evidence and reason. These people have the right to believe whatever nonsense they wish, but they also have the right to vote.
Explains rather a lot, doesn’t it?
We know the exact date thanks to the painstaking work of the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, James Ussher, who served in that role from 1626 until his death in 1656. Ussher did not reach this conclusion arbitrarily. A good deal of research was behind it, carefully laid out in his Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world.
Ussher was far from the first to set the date of creation. The Venerable Bede (673-735) set the date at 3952 BC. Johannes Kelper (1571-1630), the astronomer and astrologer, said the earth began on 3992 BC. Isaac Newton made it a round 4000 BC. Establishing the age of the earth was almost as much fun as debating how many angels could sit on the head of a pin. In other words, at roughly the same time that the Sumerians were inventing writing, the earth came into existence.
One of the key considerations in all of these dates is that the earth’s total life expectancy was thought to be 6000 years: four thousand before Christ and two thousand after. The earth and all that is in it were created in six days, and would be destroyed after six days, if one interprets “day” as did the author of the second letter of Peter: “one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”
Usher basically added up the lineages in the Bible, and where this information fell short, attempted to establish a link between the Bible and known historical dates from other sources, such as connecting the death of Nebuchadnezzar II to events in 2 Kings 25. Jesus had to be born sometime Before Christ, because history records that Herod the Great died in 4 BC. Ussher decided the first Nöel was in 5 BC.
A Gallup poll in 2008 found that 44% of US adults agreed with the statement "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." I find it hard to credit that number myself, but it’s still quite scary for anyone who believes in democracy. It says that a very large number of our fellow citizens believe that something written in the Bible outweighs physical evidence and reason. These people have the right to believe whatever nonsense they wish, but they also have the right to vote.
Explains rather a lot, doesn’t it?