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Ch. -- OF THE FALSENESS OF THE HISTORY WHICH ALLOTS MANY THOUSAND YEARS TO THE WORLD'S PAST...........

They [pagans] are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of [man as] many thousands of years, though reckoning by the sacred writings we find that not 6,000 years have yet passed.

Saint Augustine's (354 - 430) ~ The City of God

Jesus was born some 5200 years after creation so this world is not much more than 7200 years old.

Jesus was born some 5200 years after creation so this world is not much more than 7200 years old.

You're well on your way to becoming a Baptist.

The world is much much older than 7200 years, and it has been proven, scientifically.

That's the problem with the fundamentalist interpretation of Scripture: it falls like a house of cards in the face of science.

From newadvent's "Creation, Six Day's of"

St. Augustine attempted three different times to explain the Hexaemeron in a literal sense, but each time he ended with an allegorical exegesis.

In 389 ("De Gen. c. Manich." in P. L., XXXIV, 173) he arrived at the conclusion that the cosmogonic evening and morning denote the completion and the inception of each successive work.

In 393 ("De Gen. ad lit. lib. imperf." in P. L., XXXIV, 221) the great African Doctor starts again with a literal explanation of Gen., i, but is soon perplexed by the questions: Did God consume the whole day in creating the various works? -- How could there be days before there were heavenly luminaries? -- How could there be light before the existence of the sun and the stars? -- This leads him to adopt simultaneous creation, to identify the light of the first day with the angels, and to explain the evening and morning by the limitation and the beauty of the various created objects.

In 401 Augustine began the third time to explain the Hexaemeron ("De Gen. ad lit. libr. XII" in P. L., XXXIV, 245; cf. "Retract.", II, 24; Confess.", lib. XII sq., in P. L., XXXII, 825), but published his results only fifteen years later. He admits again a simultaneous formation of the world, so that the six days indicate an order of dignity -- angels, the firmament, the earth, etc. Morning and evening he refers now to the knowledge of the angels, assuming that they denote respectively the angelic vision of things in the Word of God, and the vision of the objects themselves.

Jesus was born some 5200 years after creation so this world is not much more than 7200 years old.

Tree ring data goes back to 6800 B.C. using dead wood. This uses continuous dating and tree ring variations to establish dating. We have excellent weather data on warm and cold periods where this ring mapping (Dendrochronology) has been possible. Just using this our date could not be before 8800 years old.

We also have European human artifacts going back 10000 years. I have held objects far older not made by humans in my hands. I even found a sea urchin in a limestone quarry once, it was about 100,000 years old. SOme rocks can be dated using Lead-Uranium rations back to 1billiob years.

Does this refute Adam and Eve? No, the Church recognizes that living things change over time. The account in the Bible is not false if it took many years, unless you hold that a single day is one rotation of the Earth in Genesis.

Physical genetic anthropology puts a single female as the mother of all. If she looks like the drawing bandied about by secular archaeologists is a wild guess.

>>Saint Augustine's (354 - 430) ~ The City of God<<

I do not cite Aquinas to prove through Tradition that evolution is Catholic doctrine. I only present him to show that evolution, and the belief in an old Earth are not entirely alien to Catholic tradition, and they are not merely the invention of athiests. I am quite aware that others within the Church did believe that creation lasted only six days.

Please note, however, from its context, the purpose Aristotle had in his assertions: he was pointing out how pagan mythologies are incompatible with scripture.