Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
the reopening of the Atlantic Ocean well after the life and death of the mountains testified
to by the rocks themselves.
Although I'm well versed in thinking about geologic time, I still have a hard time grasp-
ing how long it must have taken to raise and erode a mountain range, deposit the resulting
sand in the sea, fold up the seabed into another mountain range, and then erode it all back
into a new ocean. Siccar Point stands as a natural monument to the unimaginable expanse
of time required to account for geologic events.
Of course, in Hutton's day general consensus placed the world at a mere six thousand
years old. The crazy notion of a world old enough to be shaped by the slow accumulation
of day-to-day change was beyond radical, it was dangerously pagan.
Nowhere does the Bible say, “the earth is six thousand years old.” This curious belief
comes from literally adding up years gleaned from biblical chronology to arrive at how far
back the world was created. The second-century historian Julius Africanus was the first
Christian to date the Creation by drawing on Egyptian, Greek, and Persian histories. His
urgency in dating the dawn of time stemmed from the belief that Christ would return to be-
gin his thousand-year reign before the end of the world precisely six thousand years after it
all began. The only way to be sure about when the world would end was to figure out when
it started.
Adding up the ages of Adam's descendants listed in Genesis, Julius convinced himself
that 2,261 years passed between the Creation and Noah's Flood. He then summed up the
ages of Noah's descendants and used extrabiblical sources to determine the dates of key
events such as when Moses led the Jews out of Egypt and the destruction of the Temple
in Jerusalem. In this way, Julius determined that Jesus was born precisely 5,500 years after
God created the world. Adopting the tradition attributed to the prophet Elijah that the world
would only last a thousand years for each day in the week of Creation, Julius predicted that
Christ would return to end the world in 500
AD.
His
Chronologia
served as the model for
subsequent biblical chronologies, both in approach and motivation.
Centuries later, medieval and Renaissance chronologists generally agreed with Julius that
the world would last a thousand years for each day of Creation. They disagreed about when
the countdown to the end started, repeatedly pushing the date by which the world would
end further into the future as predicted apocalypses came and went without incident. By
