DID YOU KNOW?

This week’s DYK is excerpted from Chapter Six of a soon to be released book titled: “Spirituality and God,” authored by a prominent professor with long-term sobriety. For over two thousand years it has been demonstrated all around the world, that a very satisfying and effective spirituality can be devised –one which will heal the human soul and bring lives filled with peace, joy and love—as long as belief is present that the ground of being is the great sacred Mystery underlying all things, regardless of whether that ground is regarded as personal or not.

The prelude to the rise of modern atheism and eighteenth and nineteenth century attacks on the infallibility of the Bible: In the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, the greatest thinkers were willing to turn to the Bible as a source of infallible truth on a vast range of issues. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, the greatest Christian philosopher of the thirteenth century, believed that it was impossible to prove that the universe either did or did not have a beginning in time using natural science and philosophy. But since the Bible said that the world in fact had a beginning in time, he believed that we could take this as a dependable truth.

In the Early Modern period, the Anglo-Irish theologian James Ussher, who served many years as Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, made one of the most famous attempts at calculating the age of the universe using biblical texts, producing a date which was still printed in Gideon Bibles in hotels and motels across the United States when I was a child. In his Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine duducti (“Annals of Old Testament, deduced from the origins of the world”), which appeared in 1650, and in its continuation, Annalium pars posterior, which appeared in 1654, Archbishop Ussher calculated the date of creation to be the nightfall proceeding October 23, 4004 B.C.

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But by the end of the next century, the rise of modern science and modern histography had begun to show increasing problems with any kind of attempt to use the Bible in that way. Thomas Jefferson for example, the principle author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States, wrote a book in 1781 entitled Notes on the State of Virginia, in which he commented on the bones of an elephant like creature which had been dug up in Virginia, the remains of a prehistoric animal which we would today describe as a mammoth or mastodon. Jefferson noted that no known species of modern elephant could survive the cold of a Virginia winter, which led him to speculate that either this was a different kind of (now extinct) elephant-like species or that the climate of Virginia had been far different in the distant past. Today we know that both of Jefferson’s speculations were correct.

A man named James Hutton presented a paper entitled, “Theory of Earth” to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785. In that paper, he argued that the planet must be far older than had previously been supposed to allow mountains to erode, sediment to form rocks and etc. Following up on observations of that sort, geologists and paleontologists over the course of the next century began to estimate the true age of the earth at anywhere from 100,000 years old, up to even perhaps billions of years old. In 1899 John Joly of the University of Dublin calculated the rate of which the oceans should have accumulated salt from erosion processes, and determined that the oceans were abut 90 million years old. To be continued.