A reason they may think the world/universe is only about 6000 years old
Posted on: November 25, 2007 - 2:13pm
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A reason they may think the world/universe is only about 6000 years old
As many of you know, a lot of fundie Christians believe the Bible literally and therefore think the world is only 6000 years old. I remember reading in "Losing Faith in Faith" that a good reason for this may be this is about the time writing was invented. If you already believe the universe and every species of life was literally created within a week (rather than evolving over millions/billions of years) and humans were created able to talk/communicate, of course it would make sense writing would exist from the start. Any thoughts?
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Forgot to mention that back when the BuyBull was written they didn't have much else to go by - nobody had ever heard of evolution or had any posible way of figuring the actual age of the Earth or universe.
Matt Shizzle has been banned from the Rational Response Squad website. This event shall provide an atmosphere more conducive to social growth. - Majority of the mod team
You mean in addition to James Ussher's tally of the begats in the Bible that fixed the date of creation as October 23, 4004 B.C.?
"After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." -Stephen Colbert
A actually was talking about why they made it about that time when they wrote the Buybull.
Ohhh, I get it.
I also kind of wonder why the guys who wrote down the ages in the begats in the 5th century BC chose those particular ages for the descendants of Adam. I mean, obviously they're working off an oral tradition, but I wonder what basic confusion it was back along the way that caused all those huge numbers to become the ages of the patriarchs . There are lots of theories, but probably no evidence is possible.
But the oldest known examples of writing date only from about 3300 B.C., so the date of the creation as measured by Ussher is about 1000 years off. There are ideographs that are much older, but off by about 1000 years the other direction.
"After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." -Stephen Colbert
I'm going along with Textom here. It may seem like the date for the age of the Earth as the bible 'puts' it coincides with writing, but that is by far not conclusive and it is entirely incidental. There are instances of writing that date circa 3000 BCE from Mesopotamia and some as old as 4000 BCE, but instances of writing as old as 6000 BCE, as yet unverified, exist in China which would really throw a wrench in this theory. Even then, the oldest pictographs, used to represent commodities, are at least that old and represent very primitive forms of writing. Certainly the earliest pictographs didn't represent spoken language in writing, but they were symbolic recordings that could be deciphered by those who knew what they meant. Which brings up another real problem with this theory.
Writing is very important to human civilization but for the greatest time it's been around some 99% of humans could not perform the task of writing or the task of reading that writing. That is it seems retrospectively to be so important, but to just about anyone alive prior to the last 500 years it was the least important thing and certainly not something around which a Holy Book sets the proposed beginnings of Earth. Of course, even the most crazed Christians and those of other religions realize that their holy books were scripted largely after the events took place up until the time when people could actually have been writing about them as they took place. One can see this progression in the bible, from genesis to the stories of Moses, where events seem more dictated and then more authored. I don't know the bible very well, granted, but I assume I'm correct from my recollection of the two instances I give.
I stick by my strongest assertion that it is just incidental that the bible suggests the start date to be some 6000 years ago and that writing appears around that time.
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."