Dating Creation

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I recently learned that the Hubble Space Telescope has detected the oldest burned-out stars in the galaxy, enabling scientists to fix the age of the universe at 13 to 14 billion years old. This figure lingered in my mind as I recently perused a newly published version of Archbishop James Ussher’s 1658 work, The Annals of the World, which famously fixed the date of the creation of the world at October 23, 4004 B.C. This is a big difference—a 6,000-year-old universe versus a 14,000,000,000-year-old one. As my grandmother used to say, “My, how times have changed!”

The difference between these two figures has to do with what one is studying—the world of nature or the world of the Bible. In medieval times and later, these two domains were described as two books—the Book of God (the Bible) and the Book of Nature. Both books were said to be written by God, but one was a real book and the other was the observable world. The Book of God was the textual counterpart of the Book of Nature, explaining its origins, its significance, and the demands and beneficence of its author.

Beginning in the Renaissance and accelerating in the Age of Science, the easy harmony between these two books gradually turned into a rocky relationship. Galileo, one of the first great scientists of the age, declared that the Book of Nature was written in the language of mathematics, not in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek:

“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.”¹

Since that time, the language of science has not been a biblical language. Scientists learn math and geometry, and learn to program big telescopes in orbit around the earth. Only biblical scholars (like me) learn Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and we’re pretty clear about which book we are studying.

Ussher and other learned men of his time tried to apply scientific and mathematical methods to the Bible, calculating its numbers to discern the age of the universe. I recently entered this world where math and the Bible intersect when I tried to solve some of the textual problems of the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11.² (The problems stem from the different numbers for the ages of these generations in the Hebrew Masoretic Text, the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Greek Septuagint.) As a result of this research (and the little math I can muster), I differ from Ussher by 374 years for the birth of Abraham. If I were to accept all of Ussher’s other arguments and assumptions, my proposal for the creation of the universe would be 3630 B.C.E.

But I won’t advance this proposal, because there are too many gaps and contradictions in the biblical chronologies to determine a single figure. (These uncertainties led one of Ussher’s successors to list 120 different opinions about the date of creation.)³ We just can’t determine with any confidence a biblical date for God’s creation of the universe in Genesis chapter 1.

So I’ll stick with the figure from the Book of Nature, as determined by the astrophysicists with their orbiting telescope, and not by biblical scholars—14 billion years. Happy Birthday, Universe!

I recently learned that the Hubble Space Telescope has detected the oldest burned-out stars in the galaxy, enabling scientists to fix the age of the universe at 13 to 14 billion years old. This figure lingered in my mind as I recently perused a newly published version of Archbishop James Ussher’s 1658 work, The Annals of the World, which famously fixed the date of the creation of the world at October 23, 4004 B.C. This is a big difference—a 6,000-year-old universe versus a 14,000,000,000-year-old one. As my grandmother used to say, “My, how times have changed!” The difference between […]