Was earth and all universe created 6000 years ago according to the bible?

Question

The Egyptians had history of more than 10k years but was not recorded. India has a recorded history of more than 7k years. China has recorded history of more than 12k years. Now the Chinese are very clever people, invented paper, gunpowder, porcelain etc. So if the world was created 6k years ago, I bet my bottom dollar it was the work of the Chinese.

Answer 1

In biblical times, people thought that the earth and heaven were all that there was... and that the earth was essentially a 'terrarium' (you might want to look that up). They thought that the sky was a solid object, called the 'firmament', and that the sun, moon, and stars were affixed to it. So, essentially, heaven is 'on the other side of the sky'.

The story of Genesis is comprised of the myths, superstitions, fairy tales and fantastical delusions of an ignorant bunch of Bronze Age fishermen and wandering goat herders, lifted from the oral traditions of other cultures, and crafted into a tale that incorporated some of their own folk tales and pseudo-history. This collection of ignorance provides the basis for the Abrahamic death cults of desert monotheism... Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The cosmological aspects of Genesis are perfectly understandable, if you contemplate it in the proper context. At the time the bible stories were concocted, the perception was that the earth was the object and the center of creation. Why? Because they had no reason to think otherwise. Today, as we advance science, we stand upon the shoulders of all the scientists that came before. Back then there were no shoulders to stand upon... so they did the best they could with what they had... their senses and their imaginations.

* They had no concept of 'outer space', and so they conceived that in the beginning all that existed were dark waters.

* They had no concept of 'nothingness'. Remember, the concept of 'zero' wasn't invented (discovered?) until thousands of years later. With that in mind, the term 'void', as it is employed in Genesis, can not refer to 'nothingness'... it can only be applied in its alternative definition, which is 'empty'. So, the waters were dark, formless and empty (devoid of content).

* They thought that all of creation consisted of the earth and an unseen 'heaven', and they thought that the sky was a 'thing'... a substantive 'firmament' (the sky) that was created by god to separate the waters and differentiate earth from heaven, when both were created.

# They had no idea that Earth was a planet, orbiting the sun.

# They had no idea that there is no firmament... that the sky is not a 'thing'.

(If you don't believe that they thought the sky was an object... a solid barrier... consider the Tower of Babel, that they were building to reach heaven. Apparently, God ALSO thought that the sky was an object, since it concerned him so much that he confounded their speech, so as to disrupt their project and keep them from reaching his domain. God must be pretty much of a dumbass, if he doesn't even know the actual configuration of the universe that he created. So much for the 'inerrant' bible.)

* They thought that the sun was a light that god had placed upon the 'firmament' to differentiate night from day.

# They had no idea that the sun is a star... the center of our solar system.

# They had no concept of 'stars' in the same sense that we understand them today.

* They had no idea that night and day were a consequence of the earth's rotation.

* They thought that the moon was a 'lesser' light that god had caused to travel across the firmament to enable man to differentiate the seasons, and provide illumination at night.

# They had no concept of the moon as a satellite.

* They thought that the stars were tiny lights that god had placed upon the firmament to provide for omens. (Some thought that the stars were 'holes' in the firmament that allowed the 'light of heaven' to shine through.)

# They had no idea that the stars were suns, just like our own sun.

# They thought the eyeball-visible planets (Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn) were 'wandering stars'.

# They had no idea that the planets were actually sun-orbiting bodies, just like earth.

* They had no idea that the earth, itself, is a planet.

# They had no clue as to the actual nature of the earth, our solar system, the place of our solar system in the galaxy... or even of the existence of our galaxy. (Up until very recently, we didn't even know that there were other galaxies. Our galaxy, when it was first known that there actually WAS a galaxy, was thought to be the whole universe.) From their perspective, the 'earth' and 'heaven' (i.e., whatever existed on the other side of the sky) represented all that there was. A terrarium.

I do not say this things to disparage what they thought back then. They were trying to do what science is trying to do today... trying to understand reality. Today, we have technology and disciplined meta-procedures (scientific method) to help us extract answers from nature.

Back then, they did not.

Today, we have 'theories' to provide consistent explanations for what we are able to observe in nature, supplemented and validated by the additional information that we are able to extract from nature by means of our technology, our disciplined methods and our intellectual tools (mathematics, logic). Most of our theories are incomplete, so we continue to work on them... because we know that they are incomplete.

Back then, they did not have disciplined methods, and they did not have the technology to extract answers from nature. The only information they had access to was what they could see with their own eyeballs. There was no technological knowledge base or scientific context in which to interpret their observations, so they had to appeal to their imaginations... and the 'supernatural'... in order to make sense out of what they saw. Actually, what they really achieved was deluding themselves into thinking that they knew the truth. Amazingly, over time, this delusion has become codified, institutionalized, and incorporated... complete with franchises.

Basically, Genesis can be thought of as a 'theory', concocted by people who were constrained by lack of technology, methodology and intellectual tools... but they sure weren't constrained by lack of imagination.

Today, we try to interpret Genesis in the context of what we know to be true of the universe... galaxies, stars, planets, moons, gravity, orbits, inclination of the earth's axis, planetary rotation, etc. They problem is that Genesis can't be interpreted in terms of those things, because Genesis was written by men, based on oral traditions, and those men did not know about those things. They could only write about what they could see and what they could guess about the reasons that lay behind what they saw. In any event, it provided them with a mechanism to quell the innate anxiety that comes with fretting about how and why they came to be here.

They guessed wrong.

So... I think that the cosmological aspects of Genesis require a literal interpretation... no metaphors... no allegory... no hidden meaning. The key, though, is in understanding that the literal interpretation does not lead to a description of the way things are... it leads to a description of the way they thought things are. It leads to a naive description of reality, concocted by people who were doing the best they could with what they had.

It is absolutely appalling, though, to realize that hundreds of millions of people, TODAY, including participants in this forum, BELIEVE that this ignorant bovine excrement is actually TRUE.

Answer 2

First Land Animals
The first records of land animals—insects, millipedes, tiny spiders, and scorpions—occur in rocks of the Early Devonian. These animals appeared soon after plants invaded the land, and lived within the leaf litter.60 million years ago!
First Primates: 55 million years ago!
The first primates lived in Europe, North America, and Asia at the beginning of the Eocene Epoch. They belong to two extinct families, the Adapidae and Omomyidae. The former are most like lemurs, while the latter are similar to tarsiers and thus may be members of the group that comprises higher primates including humans. Although mainly represented by jaws and teeth, a few skeletons of these early primates are known and show that they already had nails on their fingers and toes instead of claws, opposable thumbs and big toes for an arboreal way of life, and forward-facing eyes. I hope this anwers your question.

Answer 3

Definitely not. The dinosaurs died 68 million years ago and the egyptian and greek civilizations were flourishing 6000 years ago. So, I doubt that the universe would have been created at that time because it would imply that Earth was there before the universe!!! The universe sprang into existence approximately 17 billion years ago and the Earth formed about a billion years ago.
For more information, or if you want to post a message got to astrowhiz on Yahoo Groups!

Answer 4

In response to both your question and Duckpupp's long reply, I have this to say:
Would people back then have been able to grasp the concept of billions of years? Millions of miles? Of Huge balls of gas soaring through a void around central gravitational sources?
Probably not. So the main issues that anti-christians bring up (such as creation, adam and eve, etc) are almost always issues that are of such import that a complete, thourough scientific explanation would have seemed like gibberish to people back then. So God gave them a simple story and let mankind figure this one out on his own.
As regards the old testament being purported "fairy tales" and "Myths", there is a lot of truth in it, e.g. the flood; while it may be a bit exaggerated, the greeks, sumerians, and babylonians all had a similar story; a man being told by some supernatural deity to build a boat (in the greek story it's a large box) and the man surviving an enormous flood. So you see, there more than mere are elements of truth in the old testament.

Answer 5

The Bible doesn't say the earth was created 6000 years ago. That is just what some have inferred based on the lineages of the first people mentioned in the Bible.

Answer 6

Not hardly.Even according to the way we measure time in our fashion.What you seem to be writing about is relatively modern history. Neither creationism nor evolution can say with any certainty exactly who long it took for the Forces the Creator set in Motion to create the physical universe to turn into what we can see today.
The Creator created time also and can control it. thus the words . a year is like unto a day and a day is like unto a year to God. Who lives in an eternal now.
And yes there is the six days and nights version . But how long where those days to God much less to us?

Answer 7

The earth is less than 10,000 years. The Chinese like all other have a no written record over 6,000 years.

In response to "duckphup" he apparently has not read the Bible!

The Bible stated 3,500 years ago that there are billions of stars.

Looks like just about everything he stated seems off the mark!

Answer 8

the earth is thousands of years old, Now this dispensation of time from Adam and eve in the garden till the second coming has been 6000 years, but there was an earth age here before when satan was still a good guy! So the earth is old and this dispensation of time is 6000,

Answer 9

It makes sense tha it was the Chinese who created the Earth. There is strong evidence even today.
Check almost anything made today, and on it you are likely to find the words
"Made in China"

Answer 10

The biblical account of the creation is true. But we shouldn't assume that "time" for our Heavenly Father follows the same increments that we do today. His day could be our day or could be our 1000 years, maybe it's a question we are yet to have answered.

Answer 11

How could all the planets, stars, etc of the universe have been created only 6000 years ago?