Stahrwe, the premises for "8,000 years as the oldest possible" are false. If Isaac Newton was a young earth creationist he was very wrong about the age of the earth. Science has proved that the earth is more than four billion years old. Your error is comparable in magnitude to saying the USA is about five yards across.stahrwe wrote:The chronology proposed by Ussher, Lightfoot, Newton (I believe he is a famous scientist and mathematician), etc. primarily used the geneaologies in the Bible. In some instances, ages at death are provided, in others they are not so assumptions have to be made. I have seen estimates up to 6,500 years, but again, with the uncertainty of the estimates 8,000 years seems a comfortable estimate as the oldest possible.
I've been thinking about creationism against the cosmology of fall and redemption. If we assume that there was some sort of fall from grace in about 4000 BC, then it makes sense to look at the dominant thought form which arose at that time and ask how it is corrupt, how it fails to engage with the truth. Immediately, we see that the false Judaeo-Christian monotheist doctrine, whereby divinity is separated from nature, has been the dominant error over the last six thousand years. The redemption of the earth requires that this fallen doctrine be left in the past, and that a new rational scientific method investigate how humanity can move away from what Augustine called a state of corruption towards what he called a state of grace. Examining the mythological basis of the Bible, how gospel myth reworked the ideas of ancient human traditions to rebind them in a new believable narrative of faith, is a starting point for understanding Christianity.
A scientific approach to religion can use texts like Sigmund Freud's 'Future of an Illusion' - (wiki, text) to show that Young Earth Creationism is a psychological illusion, and adherence to false creationist ideas can be analysed as a psychological pathology.
