You may recall that ‘In the Beginning’ I alluded to an estimate of the age of the Earth as being around 6,000 years. The truth is, I didn’t do justice to this number. It deserves more than a passing mention.
James Ussher was Archbishop of Armagh in Ireland at the tumultuous time of the civil war in Britain that led to the beheading of King Charles I and the establishment (for a limited period only) of a republic led by General Oliver Cromwell as ‘Protector’. In effect, Britain was ruled by a military junta.
Between 1650 and 1654 James Ussher published ‘The Annals of the World’,a 1300-page tome in Latin on the history of the world from the Creation to 70 CE. Working back from known and dated events in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, he deduced that the date of creation was 23 October 4004 BCE.
Although widely quoted today and often considered a naïve viewpoint, Archbishop Ussher was in fact reflecting the orthodoxy of the time in Christian Europe.
In his play, As You Like It (Act 4. Scene I), William Shakespeare wrote, ‘The poor world is almost six thousand years old’. A similar date had been derived from Biblical sources by John Lightfoot, then vice-chancellor of Cambridge University who in 1644, a few years before James Ussher published his more famous calculation, concluded that ‘Man was created by the Trinity about the third hour of the day, or nine of the clock in the morning’ at the autumnal equinox, in 3928 BCE. And as we know, the Earth was created five days earlier. Academic research published in an article, ‘Renaissance Estimates of the Year of Creation’, lists no less than 44 dates believed by over 100 renaissance notables to be the date of creation, all falling within a 200 year range around 4000 BCE*. That’s a pretty impressive concensus.
However, the 17th century in Europe was a century of transition from a predominantly religious society to the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ of the 18th century where ‘rational’ thinking started to dominate European world views. In that time of transition, a number of comprehensive cosmogonies were proposed, though they were generally long on speculation and short on substantive supporting physical evidence.
Alongside Ussher in the list of ‘notables’, there were mathematicians, astronomers and scientists also addressing the question, including philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes, the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the scientist Robert Hooke and finally one of the founders of modern science, Sir Isaac Newton (ironically born into a puritan family), who estimated the age of the Earth as some 50,000 years. It was the century of Francis Bacon, often called the ‘father of empiricism’ who emphasised observation and experimentation as the foundations of knowledge rather than a blind reliance on ancient texts. His approach almost exactly embodies the difference between the thinking of James Ussher and that of Isaac Newton.
You may recall that the century began with the Execution of Giordano Bruno in 1600 for questioning the Book of Genesis. 33 years later, Galileo, the Italian astronomer was famously forced to recant his heliocentric philosophy (the Earth moves around the sun) and died in 1642 still under papal house arrest. Just 2 years later, John Lightfoot published his calculation of the age of the Earth. So scientists of the 17th century, even those living outside Catholic countries, were both personally and politically wary of directly contradicting the book of Genesis so although based more on observation and logic than religious literary scholarship, these more ‘scientific’ thinkers were at pains to suggest that their interpretations depicted the book of Genesis as an allegorical tale rather than a literal one.
James Ussher was an Anglican Bishop who very much sympathised with the reformist Puritan movement and although he befriended King Charles in his war with Cromwell and parliament, Oliver Cromwell insisted on giving him a state funeral and he was buried in Westminster Abbey. His ideas on cosmogony, although largely superseded by science, have appropriately burrowed themselves into the consciousness of the contemporary heirs of the Puritan movement, the creationist believers of American Christianity.
Without visiting America, Europeans often underestimate the extent of this influence. In the UK for example, a 2010 survey indicated that 65% of the population accepted the Darwinian view of evolution, while 9% identified as ‘creationists’. In the USA on the other hand, a Gallup poll in the same year indicated that just 16% believed that humans evolved independently from some divine plan, while 40% held that God had created humans in their present form. 32% of Americans believed that evolution did occur but was guided by God (called ‘intelligent design’), against just 12% of Britons with that view.
In 2024, adherents to the creationist or intelligent design ideologies in America still represented 71% of respondents with less than one in four in favour of a purely scientific evolutionist view.
And numerous studies show biblicist Christianity, religiosity, and conservative political identity are all strong predictors of Americans holding sceptical attitudes toward publicly controversial aspects of science, such as human evolution.
Do 17th Century Puritan Belief Systems Still Dominate American Thinking?
It seems that after almost 400 years, Archbishop Ussher retains an extraordinary degree of influence in the world’s leading economic and military power.
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