More exactly, a happy birthday to all of creation, at least as far as James Ussher, Church of Ireland Bishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, was concerned in 1650.
He reported that the creation of the world, as described in the book of Genesis, happened at 9 AM on October 26, 4004 B.C. The actual date he picked was different, but it was on the old Julian calendar and it becomes Oct. 26 when converted to Gregorian.
Although Bishop Ussher's supposed precision earns mockery today or at least a mild chuckle, it actually represented a considerable scholarly endeavor for his time given what people in 17th century England and Ireland knew of the world. He studied ancient histories of the Roman, Persian and Babylonian Empires and several different Hebrew texts of the Old Testament to make his calculations. His method was more or less sound, but his data inputs were suspect.
Which means Bishop Ussher gave us an early description of the "Garbage in, garbage out" principle of bad data skewing a good process into producing bad results. So although he did not fix the date of creation, he did predict the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The good Bishop's work was scholarly in a way those who mock him today can't possibly imagine. Or won't. (Today's secular folks, it occurs to me, have assumed that adjective because "atheist," they dimly realize, still carries some undesirable baggage.)
ReplyDeleteIsaac Asimov said he preferred the label "humanist," because he wanted to be identified by what he was for rather than what he was against.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite was the move a few years ago for non-theists to label themselves "brights." As Dana Carvey might have said, "Well don't we just think a lot of ourselves and our blasphemous lack of belief now?"