“Time we may comprehend: ’tis but five days elder than ourselves.” So the 17th-century English writer Sir Thomas Browne summarized, almost casually, the profound question of the ultimate origin of our world, our species and time itself. In the age of scientific giants such as Galileo and Newton, most people in the Western world, whether religious or not, took it for granted that humanity is of almost the same age as the Earth. They also assumed that not just the Earth, but the whole universe or cosmos, and even time itself, are scarcely any older than human life.
The opening chapter of Genesis, and of the Bible, set out a brief narrative in which Adam (“The Man”) had been formed on the sixth day of creative action, after five days of preparation and before God completed a primal week by resting on its Sabbath day. Browne and his contemporaries did not need a repressive Church to bully them into accepting this as a reliable account of the most distant past (and anyway, in a Christendom fractured by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, there was no single all-powerful body capable of enforcing any such belief). It seemed obvious common sense to them that the world must always have been a human world, apart from a brief prelude in which the props necessary for human life had been put on stage: Sun and Moon, day and night, land and sea, plants and animals. A world without human beings would have struck them as utterly pointless, except as a brief setting of the scene for the human drama to come. So they took it for granted that Genesis gave them an authentic account of the world’s earliest origins. It came, they believed, from the hand of Moses, the only ancient historian to have recorded the earliest ages of the world; and the very first phase of that history—before any human being had been there to witness and remember it—could only have been disclosed to Moses (or to Adam before him) by the Creator himself. To cap it all, nothing in the world around them seemed obviously to suggest that its history had been otherwise.
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