Some fundamentalists have told me it was the Devil who created fossils to sow Doubt. :rolleyes:
Independent of religion, thinkers like Julian Barbour (on the boundary between physics and philosophy) have proposed, at least as “thought experiment”, such “bogus memory” scenarios. I don’t know if anyone takes such seriously.
Apparently they created an accurate calendar system and a method of documenting and tracking it too, that was one busy year.
I feel a jewish accountant joke in there somewhere.
I hesitate to speak for creationists, but I doubt that many of the modern ilk are wedded to the exact mathematics of Bishop Ussher. They’re wedded to Biblical literalism, which requires that the earth be about six thousand years old (some allow up to 10,000 years if the genealogies are incomplete), but not to an Anglican archbishop’s “solitary dodgy mathematics”.
Interesting that so many people arrived at largely the same conclusion based on guesswork.
It’s not that surprising. The bible mentions ages of people and has chronologies of its own. So what you do is you take that chronology and keep going forward until you reach something we have a known date for (like the death of Nebuchadnezzar II, who we know died in 262 BC). They’re not going to be identical, because there are discrepencies in the dates (and different versions of the bible use different dates and ages for people), but they’re going to be close.
I have used that argument with a friend who is a Biblical literalist & Young Earth Creationist, to explain why I am neither. For his beliefs to be true, God has to be deliberately lying to us, and why would I want to worship a God like that?
Yeah, but it doesn’t mention the ages of most people, and more importantly it very rarely (never?) mentions the ages at which they reproduced.
I would draw attention to a particular passage in the wiki linked above about the Ussher chronology. Bishop Ussher was wrong, of that there is no doubt, but even Stephen Jay Gould (who is about as anti-young earth creationist as you can get) was willing to cut him some slack.
Gould was resolutely against judging figures from the past by modern standards, and rightly so. Ussher lived in a time when the present understanding of science was so rudimentary that the “just look around, it’s obvious there is a God, how else do you explain all this stuff?” style of “reasoning” had little credible competition.
However, Ussher applied standards that might be thought proto-scientific to his inquiry. Rather than guess about the age of the earth, or rely on authority, he went back to the original evidence he had (such as it was) and actually tried to work it out using reason, making such estimates as were inevitably necessary but keeping them to a minimum.
In Gould’s view, contrary to the slagging he usually gets, Ussher deserves a teensy bit more respect. He may have been wrong, but he was applying more or less modern methods to the best evidence he had. He was not content simply to rely on ancient authoritative assertions about the age of the earth. In a larger sense, he was wrong, but not unworthy.
As the Wiki page quotes Gould:
"*I shall be defending Ussher’s chronology as an honourable effort for its time and arguing that our usual ridicule only records a lamentable small-mindedness based on mistaken use of present criteria to judge a distant and different past
Ussher represented the best of scholarship in his time. He was part of a substantial research tradition, a large community of intellectuals working toward a common goal under an accepted methodology*…"
Genesis 5 and 11 do, though, so you can figure out the length of time between Adam and Abraham.
If you’re interested, here’s a copy of Ussher’s Annals of the World, so you can see how he got his numbers:
OK, so the screen name doesn’t necessarily indicate that Clairobscur is female. But why do you assume s/he is male?
Neat. Thanks!
Too late to edit - here is Gould’s article. Note that of the 2000 odd pages of Ussher’s work, only a sixth or less references biblical material.
I gather that some young earth creationists have misrepresented Gould’s generaous concessions to Ussher as somehow support for their position - a proposition so unlikely and so offensive as to beggar belief.
Nevertheless, I must say I am disappointed that I did not recognise October 23, 1997 for what it was - the 6000th birthday of the world!
I would have thrown a party. 
Isn’t this thread all about how that there’s only one source for this “about six thousand years” number?
It must be true, the Bible telled me.
Because I’ve been here a while and I readwhat people write 
If the thread is about that, it’s wrong. From the wiki link in post #2:
Harold Camping professes The Great Flood was 7000 years ago.
http://jeffandcindy.wordpress.com/2011/01/08/attention-harold-camping-family-radio-listeners/
Lok:
How is it lying when he actually tells us in the Bible just how long ago the world was created?
He created a world, which, going forward, would be subject to scientific principles, and to enable man to use said principles, made a fabricated past which would be consistent with such. But in writing the Bible, he clearly stated that it was fabricated rather than actual.
Clairobscur means some creationists
Well, maybe not.
I’m male. Since I’m often mistaken for a female, I pointed it out a number of times (also, it’s mentioned in my profile). I guess he has read one of these corrections.
Thanks for these answers. I guess that in the future I’ll double guess the statements of the Jewish guy I mentioned above. Even though he’s an atheist, he’s always been very assertive in his statements about Jewish-related stuff.
The point of view expressed by Noel prosequi (what’s the meaning of this handle, by the way?) about Ussher was pretty interesting, too.
And regarding the title of the thread, I meant “how come” (and thought it was spelled “how comeS”).