Where are Muslims getting the notion that the Earth is ~6,000 years old?

Factual Questions
1

[Mods. There is a factual question here, but if you think the topic is going to provoke too much debate or opinion mongering, please feel free to move it to another forum.]

According to this article Muslim schools (presumably in Britain) are now teaching their students that the Earth was created about 6,000 years ago, and that any scientific data that says otherwise is against the Quran.

Does the Quran actually make any clear assertions about the age of the Earth? I am inclined to doubt it, although I do not know for sure. I certainly know that the Jewish and Christian Bibles do not say any such thing directly. It is possible to infer an age for the Earth by collating a lot of the details such as the ages of the various patriarchs when their sons were born, that are given in the Old Testament, but to the best of my knowledge, neither Christians nor Jews attempted such a calculation (which will also entail making a lot of questionable exegetical assumptions) until Archbishop Ussher did it in the17th century (long after the Quran was written, of course) and came up with a date for the creation of 4,004 B.C. This dating was never part of standard Christian dogma, and, was fairly quickly shown to be vastly too recent by advancing geological knowledge (and this happened in the 18th century, long before the time of Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell, and in an era when science was still dominated by devout Christians). Despite the fact that our contemporary “Young Earth Creationist” Christians now treat this dating as though there were direct Biblical authority for it, in fact it has never been a part of mainstream Christian dogma.

So, are the Muslims that claim the Earth was created about 6,000 years ago simply taking this figure from these fringe group Christians who, themselves, have only recently latched onto it (within the past century), or is there some independent source for the idea in the Quran or Muslim tradition?

Also, how widespread is this belief amongst Muslims? Is it just a few nuts in Britain, that Dawkins happens to have run into, or is it an established and widespread Muslim point of view?

As I understand it (although I am open to being corrected), Muslims do regard the Quran as, in some sense, “incorporating” the Christian and Jewish Testaments, so they might well regard the information therein as somehow “sacred” (although surely not on a level with the works of Mohammed). Nevertheless, it seems odd (as well as depressing) that they should be taking their Old Testament exegesis (and a very tendentious exegesis at that) straight from one of the most extreme and militant Christian groups out there.

2

Actually, your entire premise is wrong. Jews count the years from the creation of the world, and have done so at least since the 3rd Century CE. The Koran (and Bishop Usher, natch) probably just adapted and modified the Jewish count.

Oh, and happy new year 5772!

3

I’m not so sure about that, but I don’t want to get into a time-wasting debate with no-true-Scotsman Christians.

But whether or not it was ever part of doctrine, there is definitely direct Biblical authority for it. As you said, there are genealogies in the Bible that go back to Adam, and that give the ages of the parent when the son was born, from Adam down to Jacob at least. Other verses give the years in Egypt, and from the Exodus to the monarchy, and the reigns of some Israelite kings can be coordinated with external sources.

So you can certainly use the Bible to get the date Adam was created within a thousand years, and then it’s just a matter of taking "And the evening and the morning were the xth day " as meaning what it says to date creation as less than a week earlier. My very limited understanding of Islam is that they consider the Hebrew Bible to be generally true, but that it has been corrupted over the years, hence the corrections in the Quran. In particular, the Quran speaks of a six-day creation, and a special act of creation to create the first two humans. Like Christians and Jews, modern Muslims are prone to claim that a “day” can be any period of time.

I don’t understand the people who think it’s important to note that a day doesn’t necessarily mean 24 hours, because as long as you believe Adam was the first man, Biblical chronology cannot be reconciled with science. There’s also the matter of the sun being created after fruit trees were already growing on the earth, so it’s a mess if you take any of it literally.

4

Well, by Ussher’s count it would be about 6,015 years since the creation now, so I don’t think he could have been using the Jewish count (although he used their book, of course). I suppose it is possible that contemporary Muslims are using the Jewish count, or something derived from it. Did it get into the Quran, though, or have they borrowed it more recently?

Of course, that is what Ussher did, but it is a long way from just reading the date out of the Bible. You have to do some math, and I am pretty confident that you will have to scour the actual text pretty closely, and make quite a few educated guesses (educated by your experience as a Bible scholar) at certain points. The point is, since it seems to have taken Christians until the 17th century to even bother, is whether there any evidence that Muslims (who probably regarded the text, as you say, as unreliable, even though of ultimately divine origin) ever bothered to do so for themselves, independently.

5

This article by Gould Top Cash Earning Games in India 2023 | Best Online Games to earn real money defends Ussher (while disagreeing with him of course), and discusses the way Ussher had to use all historical resources of his time (not just the Bible) to come up with his estimate of the dates of various events in the past.

6

No, you really don’t. The only math you have to do is addition of relatively small numbers, and the genealogies are fairly compact. I remember doing this when I couldn’t have been more than ten years old. All you need from outside the Bible is the very rough date of 1000 BCE for the establishment of the monarchy.

Note that if Ussher actually got it down to exact year, month, and day, I have no idea how he did that, but as I said in my earlier post, it’s easy to get it within a thousand years or so, which is fine when the opposition claim is in the billions of years.

7

Note, by the way, that the Muslim year is defined as exactly 12 lunar months, making it a bit shorter than the tropical year most cultures (including Jews and modern Americans) use as the basis for the calendar. So if it’s been 5772 years by the Jewish calendar, that would make it 5956 years by the Islamic calendar.

8

You are mistakenly assuming that Ussher was the first to bother. It’s already been noted that the Jews used the beginning of the world in their official calendars long before then. And so did Christians:

“The Byzantine Anno Mundi era was the official calendar of the Eastern Orthodox Church from c. AD 691 to 1728 in the Ecumenical Patriarchate. By the late tenth century the Byzantine era, which had become fixed at 1 September 5509 BC since at least the mid-7th century (differing by 16 years from the Alexandrian date, and 2 years from the Chronicon Paschale), had become the widely accepted calendar by Chalcedonian Christianity. The Byzantine era was used as the civil calendar by the Byzantine Empire from AD 988 to 1453, and by Russia from c. AD 988 to 1700.
The computation was derived from the Septuagint version of the Bible, and placed the date of Creation at 5509 years before the Incarnation. Its year one, the supposed date of creation, was 1 September 5509 to 31 August 5508 BC.”

The same article states that the Quran, and Islam in general, never officially used such a dating system. But they must have used it unofficially in order to deal with the Byzantine Empire (their immediate neighbor for centuries), so the fact that they didn’t come up with their own alternative at least suggests that they pretty much accepted the Byzantine date.

And I see that I was wrong about it being easy to get within a thousand years, due to different dates in different versions of the Bible. But it’s easy to get within, say, three thousand years.

9

And from here:

“The earliest extant Christian writings on the age of the world according to the Biblical chronology are by Theophilus (AD 115–181), the sixth bishop of Antioch from the Apostles, in his apologetic work To Autolycus,[8] and by Julius Africanus (AD 200–245) in his Five Books of Chronology [9]. Both of these early Christian writers, following the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, determined the age of the world to have been about 5,530 years at the birth of Christ.[10].”

10

You can’t work out the exact year from the Bible.

From the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:
A.D. 6. From the beginning of the world to this year were agone
five thousand and two hundred winters.

Which would make this 7007, probably.

11

First off, that’s the Telegraph you’re linking…it says that a school horrified this author/atheist/activist and that Muslim students in universities don’t understand evolution. It doesn’t exactly give credible info that “Muslim schools” are doing this.

Second, it’s my understanding that it isn’t mentioned in the Qur’an. It’s open for interpretation – Big Bang and and such are acceptable theories so long as they fit within Islam (similar to what most theistic Jews think).

I haven’t met a single Muslim who thought (or was taught) that the earth was only 6,000 years old.

12

to add: There were early Jewish scholars who, while contemplating the age of the world (such as Alessan mentioned), considered that there had been more than one world, and that there were at least 900 generations before Adam or and that the world was billions of years old.

I’m willing to be that Muslim scholars have said the same thing.

13

To further what Citizen Pained has stated the article

  1. Quotes anecdotally an atheist, who is a known opponent of religion of any stripe.
  2. He also states a belief about the Earth being 6000 years old. This is a Judeo-Christian belief, not a muslim one. And IIRC, it is based upon counting backwards from the Bible (for Protestant Christians at least). Just displays his credibility on this.
  3. I am a muslim, born and raised in a muslim country (Pakistan) and I can state categorically that this was not what was taught to us.
  4. I will say this. From my own experience some muslims in Britain as well as in other parts of the west, have begun to adopt several beliefs/position from Christians, which are not prevalent in actual muslim countries. This includes a hostility to the theory of evolution amongst others.
14

Yes, that is what I suspected was going on. I wanted to confirm it though. I thought it was conceivable (but not likely) that this idea actually might have had deeper roots in Islamic tradition than it does in Christian tradition. I am glad that you are telling me that that is not true.

And, despite what brocks is saying, I am still unconvinced that its roots in Christianity go very deep either. I may have been mistaken in thinking that Christian attempts to calculate the age of the Earth from the Bible did not begin until the 17th century, but it does not follow from the fact that the Byzantines used a calendar based on such calculations that any particular creation date was, then or at any other time, considered established Christian dogma. By contrast, modern Christian “Young Earth” creationists and, apparently, the Muslims described in the article, treat it as dogma.

May I add that I did not say, and neither, I think, does the article say, that all Muslims, or even many Muslims, believe this. (Of course, the same can be said about Christians: it is only a small but vocal minority.) However, there do seem to be some Muslims, even if not very many, taking the idea up (and the Telegraph article is not the first I have heard of it), and I do think that is concerning. The Christian creationist movement has done a lot of harm of harm to science education in the United States, and if something similar were to take hold amongst British Muslims, it could potentially do a lot of damage in Britain too. I do not think it is only atheists who should be worried about such trends.

15

:confused: Hostility to evolution is more prevalent in the “actual Muslim country” of Turkey than in the United States.

16

Wow. What a depressing chart.

Unless I missed one, Turkey is the only Muslim country on the chart, and it’s dead last, by a lot, in acceptance of evolution. And among Muslim countries, it has one of the most secular governments. That makes me suspect that acceptance of evolution would be even less in most Muslim countries.

And the fact that only 40% of Americans accept it seems to contradict the claims elsewhere in this thread that rejection of science is just a matter of a tiny but vocal minority of Christians.

17

Interesting study, thanks. You misunderstood. In a country like the United States, evolution is challenged because it is percieved to violate Christian beliefs. Evolution on the other hand is generally not considered incompatible with muslim beliefs. Acceptance or rejection of evolution is a non-issue, at least on this score.

Once again, evolution is a hot topic in the US and parts of Europe due to political circumstances unique to those places , circumstances which do not exist in most muslim countries. I am pretty sure OBL for example believed in evolution, he was after all a fairly educated man; who was quite interested in and had expertise in Agriculture. On the other hand, Mullah Omer of the Taliban fame, is less likely to believe or more likely even have an idea of what evolution is,

18

There is a big difference between the active an vehement rejection of evolution that is found amongst a small but growing number of Christians, mostly in the USA (and US Christians are, of course, a minority of the world’s Christians), and the answers that will be given to surveys by people who haven’t really thought about the matter that much, and do not care about it that much, but who may have picked up the idea, both from what they have heard from the militant anti-evolutionists and from their opponents, that there is some deep incompatibility between Christianity and evolution, or even science in general. For defenders of evolution and science to buy into (and even help to spread) the idea, pretty much invented out of whole cloth by militant 20th century anti-evolutionists, that Christianity and evolution are incompatible, is dangerously counter productive.

What is going on in Turkey, I don’t know. That is disturbing.

19

I remember hearing a BBC World Service report interview a while back with a college professor in Pakistan who talked about his students rejecting science over religion. I believe it was after an earthquake in Pakistan, and the professor was explaining about how plate tectonics cause earthquakes to his students, but his students argued that saying anything more than “God causes earthquakes” was potentially blasphemous. And these students weren’t children whose only education was memorizing the Koran, they were generally from an middle to upper class background.

(Fundamentalism is scary in any religious guise.)

20

I agree with all that AK84 says

When I saw this i was sure it must be some odd case of British muslims adopting Christian beliefs.