Can God Count?
Or
The Finding of a Fossil.
According to the bible the world is 4000 years old, but thanks to science we know that the world is actually billions of years old – although scientific estimates do vary. So thanks to science we can disregard the silly old bible and get on with our lives without God, I mean what use is God if He cannot even add up?
The bible makes much of the wisdom of God, Isaiah 40:28 says,
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable. (NRSV)
But if God doesn’t know the age of His creation then perhaps the bible ought to say His understanding is ‘unreliable’ rather than ‘unsearchable’*.
Not that the bible actually says that the world is 4000 years old, if you look in the index you will find no reference to the age of the world, however this doesn’t seem to make a difference, it has become commonly known that the bible says the world is 4000 years old, and that appears to be enough to convince most people.
Two sets of people loudly insist that the bible really does say the world is 4000 years old, the first of these are Christians who say they assert the truth of every word in the bible, and the second set are atheists keen to disprove the bible.
The first set deploy both religious and scientific arguments to say that the bible is absolutely correct in saying the earth is four thousand years old, the second set raise their hands and eyebrows in exasperation at such arguments, saying the religious arguments are blind trust dressed up as faith, and the scientific arguments are bogus.
I have to admit, if the bible did say the earth was 4000 years old I would be with the atheists on this one, the sort of “science” that is used to justify the idea that the earth is a mere youngster is of the whacky internet conspiracy variety, and the religious arguments require the suspension of all incredulity – I have even seen it argued that the devil sneaked fossils into rocks to fool geologists, and thereby the rest of us, into distrusting the bible.
So how did it come about that some of those advocating the reliability of the bible, and some of those seeking to disprove the bible, both settled on the same claim, that the bible says the earth is 4000 years old, in order to make their contradictory points?
Meet The Most Reverend James Ussher (1581 – 1656), Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland. By adding up years mentioned in the bible he calculated the date of the Creation to have been the evening of the 22nd of October 4004 BC.
This was not a straightforward task, other scholars of Ussher’s time had tried and come up with similar but differing dates, the trouble is that even assuming the notion of counting up periods of time and ages in the bible is sound the authors of the bible did not write with this end in mind, so the adding up requires assembling evidence from various parts of the bible and working out how they relate. Also differing dating systems are used by different writers, over the thousands of years the bible was assembled empires and cultures developed and declined, so a working knowledge of the dating systems of several ancient cultures is needed, as is a good knowledge of the languages the bible was written in, as well as an understanding of ancient theories of astronomy and chronology. This was no Sunday school activity, it took years of determined and careful scholarship.
However, the main hitch with this methodology is that the authors of the bible did not write with this aim in mind, none of them set out to give a clear path to calculating the age of the earth because that was not their purpose in writing. The bible is a diverse set of stories about humanity’s relationship to God and to each other, told firstly through the history of the Israelites, and secondly through the history of the early Church. The primary intent of the authors of the bible is theological not scientific, how could it be otherwise as the scientific method did not come about until centuries after the last word of the bible was written? Expecting the bible to contain the logic of science is like waiting for a train to turn up in first century Jerusalem.
Reverend Ussher might retort that his time was not wasted as the authors of the bible unintentionally left a path in scripture to discovering the age of the earth, or even that the path was providentially written in by the hand of God.
That God, like some transcendental Hansel and Gretel, left a trail of bread crumbs for Ussher to follow back to the beginning of creation.
The hitch with this notion relates to the hitch with the initial notion of using scripture for a purpose other than for which it was written. Different parts of the bible are written in varying ways, there are poetic writings, histories, correspondence, sermons, prophecies, allegorical writings, wisdom literature, none of which use information in the same way as science. Using the bible to calculate the age of the earth is not only using it for a purpose for which it was not written, it is to misunderstand the ways in which it is written.
For instance, Jesus often taught by telling parables, little stories that when thought over and discussed yield profound meanings. The Parables reflected daily life, and may or may not have happened, so it would be wholly missing the point to go in search of the subjects of those stories.
Ussher’s method is like hearing the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which a foreigner helps a man who has been violently robbed, and, instead of recognising Jesus’ teaching to offer loving service to those in need, getting out a measure and calculating the distance travelled by the Samaritan, the robbers and the victim, and then producing a graph based on the resulting calculations.
The modern mind might expect numbers in the bible to be just numbers, however the writers of the bible did not always use numbers primarily for their numerical value but rather for their symbolic value. This may come as a surprise to the modern mind accustomed to finding no more meaning in a number than the quantity it indicates. However if you think about it we still do use numbers creatively, as in, “I have told you millions of times!”, or “you never put your dirty clothes in the washing basket!” In these two instances The Most Reverend Ussher would do well not to take it as fact that the first person really has been told millions times, or that in the second case the accused has never placed a single item of dirty washing in the basket.
With amorous intent we might say an attractive person is a “ten”, and our meaning be not strictly mathematical. One may read in the pages of glossy magazine of a celebratory going from “hero to zero” and not take it that the person has ceased to exist but understand that what is being said is they have suffered a rapid fall from public esteem.
The bible even signposts that God’s perspective on numbers is infinitely more complex than ours, 2 Peter 3:8 says, “…with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” Speaking of eternal things from a temporal perspective is always going to stretch our use of language.
In Genesis 22:17 God tells Abraham, “I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven.” It is a story about the founding of the nation of Israel, Jewish people take their descent from Abraham, so his offspring are indeed numerous, however not as numerous as “the stars of heaven”. There are thought to be more than 100, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 stars, so if you total up not only the number of Jewish people that have ever lived but all the people historians reckon have ever lived, 100, 000, 000, 000 , that’s a huge 99, 999, 999, 999, 900, 000, 000, 000 short of the total.
Did God in a moment of absent mindedness forget the number of stars He had made? Or can we perhaps assume that when the total is finally reached the world will end? Should we start counting the number of people who have lived who can claim to have descended from Abraham so we get an idea of when the world will end? Where is The Most Reverend Ussher when you need him?
Or is God using hyperbole? Exaggerating to make a point? As Genesis 22:17 also says Abraham’s descendants will be as numerous “…as the sand that is on the seashore,” I would suggest so… unless, as it happens, the number of grains of sand is exactly the same as the number of stars in the heavens. If all the decedents of Abraham were to get together that would be quite a crowd, it would surely look to Abraham like stars he had seen in the night sky, or like grains of sand on a beach.
Numbers in the bible pick up symbolic significance as the writers of the bible down through the ages use and reuse them, and when this happens it is a big clue that we are to regard the use of that number as primarily symbolic. So for example, the number 40. The first time we come across this number is in the story of the flood where Noah’s Ark is afloat on the flood waters for 40 days, then again when the people of Israel are wandering in the desert for forty years, and once again when Jesus is in the wilderness for forty days before he starts his ministry. The number 40 becomes a recurring motif that signifies a time of separation and testing. 40 means that as the Ark was afloat on the flood waters, and the people of Israel wandered in the desert, so Jesus was in the wilderness. 40 is a door to a group of meanings around time out, testing, separation, and preparation. The accumulated repetition of the number 40 also encourages us to see Jesus as the fulfilment of these previous occasions, the number 40 gathers, as it were, meaning momentum through the pages of scripture. If you resolutely regard 40 only as a value between 39 and 41 then the rich meaning of the number in scripture is missed. The ‘40’ message is there may be hard times in your life when it seems you have lost your way but God can save you if you trust Him, and He will bring you into new life. You may even come to see your time in the Ark/desert/wilderness as a necessary time of preparation.
Or following the example of The Most Reverend Ussher you could just count to 40.
Sometimes the significance of a number or date in the bible is primarily numerical not symbolic. So for example, the dates given in the accounts of the life of Jesus in the New Testament place him in time as a real historical figure, and can be checked against dates in other sources. The dates chronicling the Kings in the Old Testament do refer to the periods of time that the Kings reigned, and can be cross checked with other historical events. However, calendars were rather more political in those days, they were sometimes stopped and reset for a new ruler, or when a ruler became particularly mighty, and each Empire that swept through the Ancient Near East had its own way of marking time according to its own values and priorities. Calendars were also rather more religious in those days, with dates having cultic or spiritual significance, Christmas and Easter being examples that have survived into the modern era even if they have worn thin on any meaning other than commercial.
Sometimes it is not so easy to judge whether a number in the bible is being used symbolically or literally, for example in Genesis 5:27 we read that Methuselah lived 969 years and there is no obvious symbolic meaning in that number. Scholars have wondered if we have misunderstood the system used for counting years at this stage of ancient history, did they perhaps count not in periods of years but units of ten per annum? So Methuselah would be around 97 when he died. Perhaps the units of ten were religious festivals that they counted as particularly significant?
Some scholars note that in writings from other ancient civilisations ancestors are said to have lived for similar or even much longer periods. I seem to remember having watched a programme on an obscure channel that suggested this was evidence of ancient aliens walking the earth, and a vague memory of reading online that it was down to diet and that if only we ate whatever the ancients ate, as was detailed in the book being advertised, then we could all live to improbable ages, post and packing included in the price.
It seems to me that where there is a gap in knowledge theories rush in to fill it.
Personally, I doubt Methuselah lived to 969 years old. My best guess is that because in ancient cultures people had a strong impulse to honour their ancestors as a mark of respect an appropriately big number is being given for his age. It is a way of saying he was great and important. His name means something along the lines of ‘carries a big sharp weapon’, which, like his age, indicates he was someone to be reckoned with and respected. I might be persuaded Methuselah’s great age is a miracle if I could see some spiritual significance in it, miracles are a form of communication from God, but what is being communicated here? In any case, the author was not writing science or mathematics, they were writing theology and cultural identity, so I would not want to base any ambitious calculations on the number 969.
Before we chuckle or despair at the ancients being so free with figures consider Bruce Forsyth. Born in 1928, and still performing eighty seven years later in 2015, he used to joke that his career in entertainment had begun with the dinosaurs still at large. If in thousands of years’ time one of his Saturday night shows is discovered in a dusty vault who would be the fools if scholars then chuckled at us for being so primitive as to believe that Bruce Forsyth was around at the time of the dinosaurs?
The ancients were as smart as we are, they just saw things differently to us.
Even if supposing all the numbers in the bible are devoid of symbolic meaning, and actually mean what we mean by them today, there is still a huge dating problem at the very beginning of Genesis.
Genesis 1; 1-3, reads,
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”
We not told how long elapses between the initial creation, which was “formless and empty”, and when God commenced to bring order to His creation by saying, ‘“Let there be light.”’ How long was the Spirit of God hovering over the waters?
Some scholars even read the sequence here as an initial creation which becomes “formless and empty”, which is then, after a period of time, recreated.
Fundamentally the text does not provide dating evidence for the age of the earth because that was not why it was written, shake it and squint at it as you may it is not trying to be a scientific account of Creation but rather a theological account of our relationship to the Creator. It is like being disappointed because you were hoping your Ferrari was a Jeep and you can’t get to drive across a ploughed field.
I perhaps ought not be too satirical about The Most Reverend James Ussher, he was a much better academic and scholar than I could ever hope to be; given a bible, a calculator, and a concordance it would take me at least 4000 years to work out the age of the earth. As we shift into a postmodern world it is perhaps easier to see that the ancients thought and wrote with symbol and allegory far more than the Renaissance and Enlightenment realised. The Most Reverend James Ussher is indeed a true Renaissance man, a multidisciplinary scholar who thought measuring things was the way to answer all questions. We tend to expect truth to be scientific now, but truth turns up in lots of different ways, in art, in music, in poetry, in emotion, in intuition, in love and relationships, even on occasions in religion.
Science is brilliant at answering scientific questions, and theology makes a passable attempt at answering questions about God, but science wholly misses the point when trying to answer questions written in poetic language about God, and theological answers to scientific questions usually require the suspension of disbelief to be at all convincing.
The Rev’d Scrivener, a contemporary minister and writer, suggests this confusion is like a woman who on Valentine’s Day receives a red rose from an admirer only to boil it in a test tube and examine it under a microscope. Or, conversely, a man who receives a new variety of rose to catalogue for a horticultural society but instead concludes with delight that he has a secret admirer.
The comedian Kevin Bridges describes in his act how as a youth in Glasgow he and his friends would hold parties in homes from which the owners were absent, the advantage being that the party could be unfettered by adult restrictions, it most often being a house where parents were away so alcohol could be consumed freely. Such a party was called “an empty”, and the consequences of such a party both hilarious and disastrous.
Why am I telling you this?
Well imagine a video of Kevin Bridges’ show is found among the wreckage of our civilisation in a thousand years’ time. Imagine also a new civilisation has arisen, some say that the video must be in error because a house full of riotous partying youths can in no way be described as ‘empty’, others say that by miraculous powers the house was indeed both empty and full at the same time and the video must be believed, while still others argue that an empty house is clear evidence of ancient alien abductions, and a few quiet voices say, ‘you might need a sense of humour to understand what is being said here.’
God, being transcendent, cannot be measured, nor can poetic language and ideas. Feet and inches can be measured, and to great effect. However thanks to The Most Reverend James Ussher Christians apparently believe that the world is 4000 years old despite all the best evidence of scientific enquiry. Ussher’s theory has become a prism through which dates in the bible are viewed. Such was the desire of the Renaissance and Enlightenment to make theology science, and the inevitable disappointment that followed, we now find it hard to read the bible as allegory and symbol. We have become spiritually illiterate, where once in a tree the ancients saw spirits, or the creative power of God, we just see wood and then calculate the marketable value.
I have even been told by an atheist that as a Vicar I believe the world is 4000 years old, and when I said I believed no such thing, he suggested I should go and read my bible. I am sure given a few minutes on Social Media I could find a Christian literalist who would tell me the exact same thing.
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable. Isaiah 40:28
The understanding of humanity is not so exulted. We misunderstand each other, we talk at cross purposes, and hear what we want to hear. Given that we are so fallible perhaps we ought to find better ways of living with and listening to people of different opinions, even if we think we really have searched and measured God.
God knows how old the earth is but reading the bible it seems He thinks the lesson we really need to learn is to be at peace with Him and with our neighbours.
These thoughts were occasioned by the finding of a fossil (pictured).
Notes.
* In the age of Google is anything really ‘unsearchable’?
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