But to apprehend/ The point of intersection of the timeless/ With time, is an occupation for the saint.... -- T.S. Eliot,
Four Quartets, "The Dry Salvages," V, 201-2
Not to claim to be a saint; merely to suggest that Bishop Ussher was not one either.
Nor was the great American ex-patriot poet, T.S. Eliot. But Eliot had grasped that "timelessness" actually directly impinges on human life, while it appears that Bishop Ussher entirely ignores the problem. His sense of "time" is very human -- serial, sequential, irreversible -- and above all, is something that can be measured. And so, using this standard of "measurement," in close consultation with the genealogies as recorded in the Holy Scriptures since Adam, the good bishop concluded that the date of Creation was the year 4004 B.C., meaning the age of the world is roughly six thousand years and counting.
On this point, it appears that the divine revelations of the Holy Scripture and the Natural World itself (see: Romans 1:20), the latter as explicated by scientific inquiry and human experience in general, are seriously at odds with each other.
This cannot be attributed to any shortcoming of Divine Intellect or Will. If there is a disconnect here, the fault must lie on the human side.
I suspect the fault lies in the failure of humans to appreciate their essential existential position, which is that man lives at the intersection of time and timelessness.
The Incarnation of Christ makes this existential fact absolutely crystal clear and beyond doubt. The mortalization, incarnation of a human soul involves placing a timeless, eternal entity into physical embodiment, for a time. That body is fully subject to the natural laws, and so perishes in due course. But the soul itself is eternal, everlasting. But this most essential fact about human nature is what most of us tend to forget. We do not "see" the "timelessness" involved in our own personal being, in every aspect of our daily lives....
Dear TXnMA, you pick off Bishop Ussher for his date, noting that splendid artifacts have been found in Texas that clearly indicate human action of great artistry and technique predate Ussher's inception date by some six thousand years. But in so saying, can you possibly mean that the fabricators of such splendid tools predated Adam and Eve?
I guess the answer to that question all boils down to how we deal with "the time problem"....
Thank you ever so much for writing, dear brother in Christ!
Dear TXnMA, you pick off Bishop Ussher for his date, noting that splendid artifacts have been found in Texas that clearly indicate human action of great artistry and technique predate Ussher's inception date by some six thousand years. But in so saying, can you possibly mean that the fabricators of such splendid tools predated Adam and Eve? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Yes, Dear Sister, that is precisely what I am suggesting that we consider -- as a possible interpretation of how events (actually and Scripturally) transpired..
And, that does include a thriving and accomplished population of homo sapiens here on Earth, at the time that Adam and Eve were ejected from the Garden and into their midst!
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And, yes, indeed, as you so cogently stated: "I guess the answer to that question all boils down to how we deal with "the time problem"...."
Please bear with me...
I am trying to have us open our minds to the possibility that Bishop Ussher, by following the genealogies in Genesis, and, looking backwards toward the instant of creation (as we, from our spatio-temporal reference frame are forced to do) was surprisingly accurate in his dating of the creation and expulsion of Adam and Eve. (NOTE: I do not tie Ussher's date (in 'our' years) back to "The Inception").
Remember this?
In another, similar illustration and discussion, where this graphic says "Now", that one said, "The Age of Man". That is probably a better interpretation.
Following the fall of man, we, Ussher (and Scripture, itself) are bound to our reference frame, where all information (including time-related info) is transported and received at the limit of "C" -- the speed of light... And, we are restricted to only looking backward -- into the past...
As in our "Universal Now" discussion, God has no such temporal limitations.
There is zero doubt in my mind that Adam and Eve were physically formed as anatomically-modern Homo sapiens sapiens, and were uniquely, especially and Divinely created as eternal souls in the (Spirit) image and likeness of God.
There is also zero doubt in my mind that anatomically-modern Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied this planet for far more than the >ten thousand years documented on this continent. For most of that time, Homo sapiens survived as roaming hunter-gatherers.
Further, it is well-known that some groups of humans later developed nomadic animal husbandry as a supplement to hunting and gathering.
And -- it is well-documented that agriculture is a quite recent development of humankind (which, rather quickly, caused / allowed the sedentary settling of societies into towns, etc.)...
With the above in mind, here's a tidbit for further cogitation:
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What was the occupation of Cain, Eve's firstborn? And what was the occupation of Abel, her second son?
For that matter, what was Adam's livelihood?
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,,,and we're just getting started... ;-)