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Bishop Ussher’s Presumption

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James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (1581-1666)

According to his careful calculations, the world was created on “the entrance of the night preceding the 23rd day of October… the year before Christ 4004.” That would make Earth 4,259 years old. And, of course, it had to be true because one couldn’t question the Bible in any particular. It was just a matter of adding up the years of all the “begats” in Genesis, and adding to it the generations of men in the following books of the Old Testament.

I am reading a fascinating book by Loren Eiseley called The Firmament of Time about how the age of the Earth grew by leaps and bounds after discoveries by geologists, astronomers, and other scientists.

There are still people who believe in the literal truth of every word in the Good Book. The Scopes trial took place in Tennessee exactly a hundred years ago. In some corners of the United States, there has been little or no movement since then.

“God and the Devil Are Blood Brothers”

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“Satan Before the Lord” by Corrado Giaquinto (1703-1768)

The following is from Mircea Eliade’s “Mephistopheles and the Androgyne or the Mystery of the Whole” in his The Two and the One.

The motif of the association, indeed the friendship, between God and the Devil is particularly noticeable in a type of cosmogenic myth that is extremely widespread and can be summed up as follows: In the beginning there were only the Waters, and on those Waters walked God and the Devil. God sent the Devil to the bottom of the ocean with orders to bring him a little clay with which to make the World. I omit the details of this cosmic dive and the results of this collaboration by the Devil in the work of Creation. All that concerns our purpose are the Central Asian and South-Eastern European variants which stress the fact that God and the Devil are blood-brothers, or that they are co-eternal or, indeed, God’s inability to complete the World without the Devil’s help.