Dating
Radiometric dating methods currently reckon the age of the Earth to be some 4.5 billion years and the age of the Universe to be nearly 14 billion years. However, scientists modify these figures more or less every generation according to the latest theory. The accuracy of such methods, for example carbon-14 for recent dates, or potassium-argon for long ago, is dubious. Carbon-14 sometimes gives the most contradictory dates for anything more than about 2,500 years old and even before that it can err by up to two or three centuries. As for potassium-argon, it can date a rock formed by lava from a volcanic eruption a few years ago as being 200 million years old.
This imprecision comes about because these dating methods presume that depletion of the element in question is constant. It may not be. Given this inaccuracy, suppose we suspended our disbelief and regarded such dating systems and ‘scientific’ mythologisation regarding Creation as a cultural error? What if we took literally, and not symbolically, the traditional Christian Roman dating system, as used by the Orthodox Church? Whereas the old pagan Roman calendar dated everything from the foundation of pagan Rome in 754 BC, the Christian Roman calendar dates everything from the Creation, dated to 1 September 5509 BC.
In other words, in order to convert to the Christian Roman calendar, we must add 5,508 to the current year, if it is between January and August, and 5,009 to the current year, if it is between September and December. Thus, in December 2024 the Christian Roman date from Creation is 7,533. (Fundamentalist Protestants use the much later Jewish text of the Old Testament and generally date Creation to 22 October 4004 BC, making today 6,028 years from Creation). Most Orthodox Christians treat the date for Creation and the Six ‘Days’ of Creation as purely symbolic, and none of this is a dogma. However, if taken literally, it would have some very interesting implications.
From Prehistory to History
The acceptance of such dating would completely change our understanding of what is known as ‘Prehistory’, more precisely ‘pre-literary history’. For Prehistory was transmitted only orally, as it is the period before writing systems were invented –which was soon after the Flood, as dated according to the Septuagint (see below). Therefore, taking the Christian Roman calendar, Prehistory would have lasted not billions or millions of years, but only about two millennia, from 7,533 to 5,291 years ago (Genesis 1-5), as the Church’s Septuagint text of the Old Testament dates the Flood to 5,291 years ago, 2,242 years after Creation.
We know little of Prehistory because of the Global Flood of Noah’s time which literally washed it all away, including the corpses of the relatively few people (a few tens of thousands?) then living. However, we do know what was later written down by Moses from the oral tradition passed down from the survivors, the much-mocked Noah and his family, who alone had not consorted with demons. And we should recall that since people lived for hundreds of years (for example, Adam = 930 years, Jared = 962 years, Methuselah = 969 years) oral traditions were basically stories handed down from ancestors, whom they had personally known. Thus, Adam was Noah’s seven times great-grandfather. (For comparison, one of my seven times great-grandfathers was born fewer than 400 years ago, not 2,242 years ago).
For instance, the first Book of Moses records that between the Fall and the Flood people, often called ‘neanderthals’, at first lived primitively in caves and wore animal skins, becoming hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists (see Genesis 3, 23-24 and 4, 1-3). What is clear is that those who had such long lifetimes must have become very skilled and technologically sophisticated, especially because of the presence of half-demon giants (nephilim) with their immense strength (Genesis 6, 1-4). From this period we also have folk memories, recorded universally in folklore with its giants (Genesis 6, 1-4), monsters, dragons, demons (elves, goblins, gnomes etc), angels (fairies), wizards and witches. With a lifetime of many centuries to experience, learn and think, many things became possible. Their civilisation was surely advanced.
In recent years there have been discoveries of complex stone structures now hundreds of feet under the sea, which may indicate that such technological progress took place. Some have interpreted these as confirming the many legends of vanished advanced civilisations, now flooded worlds, such as that of Atlantis. In any case, Genesis 4, 17-20 records the first settlements and towns. Genesis 4, 21 records the first musician. And Genesis 4, 22 records the first use of bronze, dated to about 5,300 years ago by archaeologists, and the use of iron, again showing the progress from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age. Why was it all destroyed by the Flood? Because the Earth had been demonised and, apart from Noah and his family, there was no further possibility of salvation. The existence of the Earth had become senseless until it had been cleansed.
The Flood
In Chapters 5-9 the Book of Genesis records the Universal Flood of 5,291 years ago. This Flood would have formed all geological layers, or strata, of rock, formed for instance from crushed clay (shale), chalk and seashells (limestone) sand (sandstone), mud (mudstone), trees and vegetation (coal) and other geological materials. The Flood, providentially for us, formed ‘petroleum’ (literally ‘rock-oil’), that is, oil, as well as gas from buried sea creatures and coal from buried forests. This also created fossils of animals which drowned instantly and were crushed, for there was no time for decomposition, as with animals which die slowly and naturally. (Fossilisation has hardly ever occurred in recent millennia). The future fossils were buried immediately beneath the floodwaters and the silt they carried – 4.5% of all fossils are of plants, and 95% are of marine creatures, which are also found on mountain peaks. Only 0.5% are of birds, animals and mammals.
The Flood formed the continents and islands, more or less as we know them today, as the original single land mass or ‘Pangea’ (Genesis 1, 9) was separated out as moving tectonic plates divided them. Continental drift began, as mountain chains rose up thousands of metres high from plains through very violent volcanic activity and the movement of the tectonic plates, when ‘the fountains of the great deep burst forth’ (Genesis 7, 11). Meanwhile, mainly in the far north of Europe and North America, there began the Ice Age, the result of floodwaters, heated by volcanic eruptions, condensing and freezing. The volcanic eruptions would also have blocked out the sunlight in those areas and killed the mammoths by asphyxiation through dust particles, which is how they died out. This Ice Age lasted for several hundred years over northern land areas, but it continues today in the Arctic and the Antarctic, though the ice there has been contracting for at least two centuries.
All animals and mammals, including the many which are today extinct, are descended from those in the Ark and developed into different species. They had obviously been selected and entered the Ark when they were very young. These did not include any fish, like ‘the leviathan’ (recorded in Job and the Psalms) and the sea monster (the Book of Jonah, where it was mistranslated as a ‘whale’). However, they would have included ‘dinosaurs’, recorded in the Old Testament as ‘the behemoth’ (Job 40, 15-24) and ‘dragons’, (see especially Daniel 14 in the Septuagint and the Psalms), as also in all folklore. (Did St George later kill the last ‘dragon’?). As Genesis 8, 4 tells us, the Ark was deposited on the mountains of Ararat, in the far west of today’s Turkey near Armenia.
People moved down from here along the rivers and settled in what is now called Mesopotamia (the land between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates) in today’s Iraq. The Flood is also recorded in garbled legends, like that of the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh, and the other 300 ‘creation myths’ of different peoples worldwide. All humanity is descended from the 8 people, 4 couples, with their huge gene pool of all humanity, who were saved in the Ark. Indeed, genetics tends to confirm the origin of humanity from those eight people. This means that all human-beings are much, much closer to one another than according to the ‘scientific’ version, which dates human-beings back hundreds of thousands of years. In the Septuagint version we are all cousins, descended from only 5,291 years ago through only 200 or so generations.
History Begins
Now we enter recorded history and parallels with the Old Testament. Interestingly, according to archaeologists, the earliest known writing systems appeared about 5,250 years ago. This was just after the Flood, as dated by the Septuagint. At that time Noah planted the first vineyard (Genesis 9,20) and in Genesis 10-11 we read of the building of a great Tower (of Babel) some 5,150 ago. After its collapse, people were scattered (Genesis 11,9) to the ends of the earth, in a confusion of tongues, which led to the development of today’s more than 7,000 languages. People moved north, west, east and south, founding new civilisations in the course of time. Thus:
Stone Age monuments in Europe, like Carnac, Stonehenge, Silbury, Avebury and Skara Brae in Orkney, date back to about 5,100 years ago.
The Indus civilisation began about 4,500 years ago.
The first Egyptian pyramids were built some 4,500 years ago and African civilisations developed, gradually spreading further south. Thus, the Bantu moved into Central Africa some 4,000 years ago, finally arriving in South Africa some 2,400 years ago.
Genesis 11,26 records the birth of Abraham some 4,145 years ago.
The first Chinese dynasty appeared some 4,100 years ago.
The African-looking Olmecs settled in Central America some 3,200 years ago.
Civilisation began in Japan some 2,700 years ago.
The first people reached Tahiti some 2,500 years ago.
Amazonian civilisation began about 2, 500 years ago.
In Australia civilisation appeared some 4,000 years ago.
The Cahotian, Aztec and Inca civilisations in the Americas appeared about 1,000 years ago.
The first people settled in Hawaii some 1,000 years ago.
Finally, people reached New Zealand and Easter Island some 800 years ago.
Most will not be able to suspend their belief in the customary secular system, which since the last century has dated the age of the Universe at billions of years. They will regard the above as fantasy. But if they took it seriously, then very different perspectives would open up before them.