By half a billion years ago, complex life had spread through the ocean and diversified into all the basic body plans that still exist today (and a lot that don’t).Half a billion years later, oxygen started to accumulate in the atmosphere, and in another half billion, rose high enough to trigger an ecological collapse and rebalancing in which plants and animals came to dominate the biosphere.A billion years later, cyanobacteria started producing oxygen as a waste product, and this started precipitating iron dissolved in the oceans into the deposits we now quarry for ore.Life appeared no less than 3.8 billion years ago.The Earth formed a persistent solid surface 4.54 billion years ago.Nature tells us Ussher was off by six orders of magnitude. When nature disagrees with scripture, scripture must necessarily be wrong. In other words, even if Ussher’s calculation were correct (it isn’t) it would only tell us when Abraham lived, not when the world was made.īut even this doesn’t matter, for as Thomas Paine reminded us, the only revelation we can really trust is the creation itself. As William Henry Green wrote, “The Scriptures furnish no data for a chronological computation prior to the life of Abraham and the Mosaic records do not fix and were not intended to fix the precise date either of the Flood or of the creation of the world.”
Usher made a lot of assumptions, chose to ignore inconsistencies within even those scriptural sources known at that time, and was unaware of certain, now obvious translation issues, importantly including the way the Babylonians counted, but that’s beside the point. The 6,000 year age was arrived at by James Ussher, a 17th century Irish Archbishop who counted up estimates of the ages of Abraham’s family listed in the Old Testament and calculated that the creation began (on the Julian calendar) on Saturday, OctoBC, at 6 pm. True, scientific progress repeatedly found our home to be much older than previously suspected, but the widespread view that the planet is only a few thousand years old is relatively new, and has no basis in either fact or scripture. This age is arrived at by several cross-checking lines of evidence, but the great antiquity of the Earth has been apparent for much of human history.
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