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Sci Tech    H3'ed 8/24/12

The world is not 10,000 years old. The Bible says so.

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Annales Veteris Testamenti page 1 by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ussher_chronology

A recent Gallup poll showed that 58% of Republicans think the world was created in the last 10,000 years, with humans in their present form.  Gallup concludes:
"Despite the many changes that have taken place in American society and culture over the past 30 years, including new discoveries in biological and social science, there has been virtually no sustained change in Americans' views of the origin of the human species since 1982. The 46% of Americans who today believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years is little changed from the 44% who believed this 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question."
Where does this 10,000 year figure come from?  Well, many of the people who believe this, a shockingly ignorant lot, may not know this, but the best source of this figure, sort of, which I'll get to in a moment, is Bishop Usher (sometimes spelled Ussher).  From Wiki:

"The Ussher chronology is a 17th-century chronology of the history of the world formulated from a literal reading of the Bible by James Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh (Church of Ireland). The chronology is sometimes associated with young Earth creationism, which holds that the universe was created only a few millennia ago by God as described in the first two chapters of the Biblical book of Genesis.

The full title of Ussher's work is Annales Veteris Testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti, una cum rerum Asiaticarum et Aegyptiacarum chronico, a temporis historici principio usque ad Maccabaicorum initia producto. ("Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world, the chronicle of Asiatic and Egyptian matters together produced from the beginning of historical time up to the beginnings of Maccabes")

Ussher's work was his contribution to the long-running theological debate on the age of the Earth. This was a major concern of many Christian scholars over the centuries....Using these methods, Ussher was able to establish an unadjusted Creation date of about 4000 BC. He moved it back to 4004 BC to take account of an error perpetrated by Dionysius Exiguus, the founder of the Anno Domini numbering system."

Now, Usher did his homework, and other biblical scholars in the centuries since then have found no reason to contradict him.  So, the bible says the world was created Saturday night, October 22, 4004 BC (6016 years ago).  OK, so if anyone who claims the world is 10,000 years old, or some other figure slightly less, tell them they are contradicting the bible. 

But, now that we've nailed down the biblical date of creation, some immediate problems arise, beyond the obvious scientific ones of fossils, carbon-dating, plate tectonics, cosmology, species extinctions, etc.  This is now a date recent enough that it starts to bump into near-recorded history.  For example, The Dawn of Civilization lists the following:

" Egypt

Egyptian farmers had settled in the long and narrow valley of the Nile River by 5000 BC. Within 2,000 years they had invented writing, built massive irrigation works, and established a culture that bequeathed the pyramids and other magnificent monuments to posterity. The primitive farming settlements of Egypt were concerned with the raising of vegetables, grains, and animals. These settlements slowly gave way to larger groupings of people. Probably the need to control the Nile floodwaters through dams and canals eventually led to the rise of government in the region."

and

"India

The valley of the Indus River is considered to be the birthplace of Indian civilization. Located on the Indian subcontinent in modern Pakistan, the Indus civilization was not discovered by archaeologists until 1924. The ancient history of this region is obscured by legend. It appears, however, that by 4000 BCprimitive farmers were raising vegetables, grains, and animals along the riverbank."
and

"Agriculture--The Basis of Civilization

The single, decisive factor that made it possible for mankind to settle in permanent communities was agriculture. After farming was developed in the Middle East in about 6500 BC, people living in tribes or family units did not have to be on the move continually searching for food or herding their animals. "

From Wiki:

"The earliest signs of a process leading to sedentary culture can be seen in the Levant to as early as 12,000 BC, when the Natufian culture became sedentary; it evolved into an agricultural society by 10,000 BC. [ 7 ] The importance of water to safeguard an abundant and stable food supply, due to favourable conditions for hunting, fishing and gathering resources including cereals, provided an initial wide spectrum economy that triggered the creation of permanent villages.[ 8 ]

The earliest proto-urban settlements with several thousand inhabitants emerged in the Neolithic. The first cities to house several tens of thousands were Memphis and Uruk, by the 31st century BC (see Historical urban community sizes)."

One can play this game all day, just by Googling "Earliest civilizations."  Unlike the Bible, a mis-translated compendium of oral tales from the Bronze Age, these sources can be traced to their original research, but one hardly needs to bother where Bible-thumpers are concerned.  Just ask them if they believe their own Biblical scholars like Bishop Usher.  If they do, than ask them how they explain earlier histories of civilization?  If they don't that means either Bishop Usher is wrong - which no one says, when it comes to interpreting the start date in the bible - or, gasp, the Bible is wrong about the age of the world.  Of course, if it is wrong about the age of the world, it can be wrong about anything, and everything.

So, once again, the literal bible-believers are proven ignorant magical thinkers.  They don't even know their own bible, and if they did, their belief in it would be proven even more ridiculous than it already is.
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Scott Baker is a Managing Editor & The Economics Editor at Opednews, and a former blogger for Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Global Economic Intersection.

His anthology of updated Opednews articles "America is Not Broke" was published by Tayen Lane Publishing (March, 2015) and may be found here:
http://www.americaisnotbroke.net/

Scott is a former and current President of Common Ground-NY (http://commongroundnyc.org/), a Geoist/Georgist activist group. He has written dozens of (more...)
 

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