Oct. 22, 4004 B.C.: Universe Usshered In

[Posteritatis]

Wired observes what is certainly a non-anniversary, but something that's still interesting:

4004 B.C.: It’s the beginning of time, according to 17th century Irish bishop and theologian James Ussher — and not just any old moment on that fateful date, but “on the beginning of the night.”

Ussher’s calculations, published in the Annals of the Old Testament, Deduced From the First Origins of the World, strike most modern sensibilities as absurd. Except for a few Young Earth Creationists, believers and nonbelievers alike agree that if a supernatural entity created the universe, it happened about 13.75 billion years ago.

But Ussher was far from the first person to wildly miscalculate the universe’s age. Indeed, dating the universe was quite the scholarly fad. Among others to try their hand were Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, both of whom arrived at estimates younger than Ussher’s.

All labored without a number of modern tools — not only for measuring radioactive decay or rates of the universal expansion, but an intellectual framework for conceiving of time on scales beyond the biblical.

Short but interesting article. I'm posting in the Science forum as much in jest as anything else, given how half the posts on any article involving the year 4005 BC or before get drowned in Ussher-related comments. (That, and if I posted this in GD it'd devolve into yet another tired religious wankfest that ignored the actual article.)

That said, I agree with Gould's assessment. Chronology on a large scale is bloody hard even when you've got lots of data on hand, and Ussher didn't have lots of data on hand. "Honourable effort for its time" fits, even though most of us know better and plenty more should know better by now.

[xchrom]

1. It's just speaks to the sophistication of people

At that time to make complex calculations - even when
They were wrong.

[htuttle]

2. The inability to conceive of extra-Biblical time scales was a Western-mind problem

As so many have pointed out before, traditional Hindu religious texts spoke of some events happening over a scale of many billions of years.