Whenever you get into a discussion about the origins of mankind, how long ago the whole shebang we call the Earth started usually comes up in the argument. If you claim any other number than six thousand years, that’s as good as greasing up your Satan-worshipping gear and getting ready to plunge into Hell, as far as Chickians are concerned. They must be damned certain, then, about that figure. So does the Bible list an exact date? No, not exactly. And there isn’t a magical number that counts the years up either.

So how do the Christians know this information? The age of the world is calculated by taking the entire genealogy of the human race and adding the amount of years we believe we’ve kept tract of. This method is pretty haphazard, but from a Christian perspective, its rock solid, because the Bible says so.

Or does it? One fact that fundamentalist yahoos tend to deny is that there are actually a few books of the Bible that were left out when the Catholic church decided to put the whole thing together. What if these books contain more history and added more years? And I’m going to assume that the Christian scholars weren’t boneheaded enough to forget that some people in their history lived to be over nine hundred years old, a fact that, if overlooked, would really throw a wrench into the works.

But let’s assume for a second that the Christians really do have all of the answers on this one, and mankind did exist for six thousand years, despite what science would say otherwise. This still doesn’t tell us the age of the actual world.

We’re told that the universe was created in six days. No, actually we’re told this process just focused on the Earth, but I’m willing to leave that alone for now. Let’s talk about this concept of “days” for a moment. What, exactly, is a “day” to God? Time is just a concept humans made up so they could tell when to commit sin and for how long. To God, time is a non-factor. Perhaps he was so wrapped up in what he was doing that he didn’t notice a couple million years passed by while he was creating things. Or maybe he set the entire thing in motion and let creation create itself, via evolution.

A biblical evolution concept isn’t completely ridiculous. The Bible does say in Genesis 1:20 “And God said ‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” Keep in mind that at the time, God was said to have created not only the water and the sky, but a dome of water that made up the upper atmosphere of the Earth (really, but we never really figure out what happened to it. Chickians state that God used those waters to flood the world in the Great Flood, but the Bible mentions nothing of this). If you really want to bring things up to interpretation (as most religious folk do), this means that these “birds” could have been another form of aquatic life that could have jumped onto the dry land that God created two “days” before hand. I admit the last one is a stretch, but the language of the first part of the verse sounds like something Darwin would agree with.

Again, I’m making some clueless assumptions here, so let’s assume that a day is a day. Fine, so everything was created in six days… or was it? In Genesis 1:1, it says “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

It doesn’t say that God started creating things on Earth at the beginning of time. It simply states that “God created the heavens and the earth.” The Earth was a “formless void” for some undeterminable length of time, before “days” were even possible, since there was no light. Anyone stating otherwise is just making the figure up, just like I am.

It’s possible that rock existed below the surface of the water, or “deep,” thus giving us our figures, yet preserving the Christian idea that the Earth, as we know it, started thousands of years ago.

I’ve got to mention dinosaurs while I’m at it. Christians (Chick) can’t argue about the existence of something resembling them, so they concede that dinosaurs existed, but at the SAME TIME as man, much to the disagreement of the scientific community. If this were true, you’d think someone in history would have mentioned them, being massive lizards and all. And where did they go in the last six thousand years? Someone should have seen something.

Using this reasoning, the existence of dinosaurs almost disapproves the story of creation. I’m sure a few desperate Christians will point out that the dinosaurs could have been wiped out in the Great Flood, but Noah was instructed in Genesis 7:2 to take “seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and the female; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and its mate.” So Noah would have had to bring everything with him, including the dinosaurs (even Chick depicts this), so one would assume they would have been around long enough to get some mention in human history. Then again, history teaches us that the people of this time were highly illiterate and probably had more important matters to worry about, like not being eaten by dinosaurs.

The Bible never mentions dinosaurs, by the way, which hurts its credibility. You’d think the evil pagans would try sacrificing Jews and Christians to dinosaurs. It sounds like something they would do.

By now I’m getting incredibly off topic, so I’ll end things by restating what we have established. The only solid fact we have is that there is no date on the creation of the Earth itself, therefore leaving the possibility that it’s quite a bit older than the faithful in God give it credit for. So instead of whining about the age of the Earth, a fact you don’t really know, why don’t you focus on your religious studies and leave the rest of us heathens alone?

[post your thoughts]