Skeptics, Where Is Your Evolution History?

@SW-User Is Kim Ham merely trying to claim cheap credit for what's already been done?

[i]The 4000-year (some say 6000 year) myth is not Biblical[/i]

It started as a rough guess based on no real evidence or analysis, about 400 years ago, by the mid-17C Archbishop of Ireland, James Ussher.

Like modern fundamentalists, Ussher ignored the possibilities of the Hebrew authors drawing on prior beliefs or intending metaphors and parables. He assumed at best an average generation span calculable by him only from church records of his own culture, place and time; and applied that to the stories' own character geneologies.

As I recall, the Bible never even gives anyone's ages or calendar years.

@ArishMell I was thinking the same. Thank you for the information.
However I see there are many who firmly believe the 6000 years theory. What I understand is that their conviction is deeply rooted from their religious beliefs and they get hurt when that belief is questioned. Also I haven't read the Bible. Hence it would be unfair on my part to challenge that theory. Also I do not know whether Bible mentions ages and calendar years. The posted video illustrates 6000 years from Adam to present. As per my reasoning that is just the age since human existence (if Adam was the first human) and not the age of earth.

@SW-User That flaky attempt at geneology is all right as far as it goes, given that its source material is based on oral tradition and assorted legends anyway.

The difficulty is that the most fervent Biblical literalists trap themselves into dating the age of the Cosmos, let alone just mankind, as 4000 or 6000 years by adding to one society's own ideas of its own history, the mythical few preceding days as if fact!

Of those ages, even 4000 years for the Hebrew culture alone is probably too long; 3000 more likely, but anyway only a rough guess in the absence of any real records. The books that became collated later as the Torah, and re-arranged centuries later still as the Old Testament, probably date from within the last 5 centuries BCE. They include an early attempt at social history, but could not possibly be accurate; and anyway were to support the religious message of writers [i]genuinely [/i]ignorant not only of anything scientific; but also of other cultures even older than theirs, in lands far from theirs.

There may be an uncomfortable qualifier there though. The Ancient Hebrews would have known, and traded with, some of the other peoples around their region in what were their Late Bronze Age times. They even accused the Egyptians of having enslaved many of them - fairly or not. Also, their faith had to come from somewhere.

So was their message not just that of a god our times still worship as "God", but with it rejecting the past, suppressing previous beliefs and installing a "new world" dogma on a "Year-Nought" principle? We have seen that principle used in our own times, along with invasions and wars, religious bigotry and iconoclasm all also apparent in the Bible, so I don't think it unreasonable to consider an ancient "Year-0" precursor too.

Now, obviously the unknown Genesis author was no astronomer or geologist but he seems to have thought logically about the universe, when most other religions such as the Greeks' simply concocted any old creation-myth going. The Adam and Eve myth might have been entrenched from earlier times. If so, perhaps he knew the Hebrews had their social predecessors; perhaps realised that God took more than a metaphorical week to create everything; but he had a political as well as theological imperative for a Darkness--to-Eve-in-6-Days tale starting a rough-and-ready local history.

Perhaps he was writing for leaders who were gluing several disparate tribes into a cohesive, uni-theological, monarchical, patriarchal society, in the face of various enemies and lingering traces of older faiths; so needed their subjects to be ignorant of their own past.

The answer is of course, we cannot really say. We do not know anything about who wrote those books, for a start, only that they date to over some centuries. Really, among the Middle Eastern / Mediterranean cultures, any writing of real histories started with the Greeks and Romans; not the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians and Hebrews.

Yet it is a thought.....

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The literalists become upset primarily because they do like being questioned, fear uncertainty, and seem unable to see how you can be both spiritual and intellectual.

@ArishMell [quote]Of those ages, even 4000 years for the Hebrew culture alone is probably too long; 3000 more likely, but anyway only a rough guess in the absence of any real records. The books that became collated later as the Torah, and re-arranged centuries later still as the Old Testament, probably date from within the last 5 centuries BCE. They include an early attempt at social history, but could not possibly be accurate; and anyway were to support the religious message of writers genuinely ignorant not only of anything scientific; but also of other cultures even older than theirs, in lands far from theirs.[/quote]

That would be true if those were written by men alone, but they weren't. Men are not that smart to keep accurate records like that over thousands of years unless God were with them.

Thank you @ArishMell for providing a detailed analysis. I strongly resonate with our opinion.
[quote]The difficulty is that the most fervent Biblical literalists trap themselves into dating the age of the Cosmos, let alone just mankind, as 4000 or 6000 years by adding to one society's own ideas of its own history, the mythical few preceding days as if fact![/quote] Basically this 6000 years theory revolves around Adam as a reference point. That makes previous 5 days of creation irrelevant. I am also surprised that Eve is not given much importance throughout the hierarchy.
From Biblical literature, I see that the feminine is merely represented as a helper to masculine.

I didn't knew about Torah earlier. That makes sense. If I understand you correctly selected subsets and practices of different cultures that evolved over time were handpicked and consolidated. Many of them abstracted and some of them zoomed. Also few of the modern religions share the old testament. Old testament diverged into two or more branches with proprietary ways of connecting the dots and each proprietary branches started competing for exclusiveness and authenticity.

I am just mentioning my inference from the sequence of events that you mentioned. Tracing back many of the old cultures may not be purely mythical. There could be scientific research done at that times in their capacity ( need is the trigger for invention) and myth was used to encapsulate over it in order to make common people understand them. Fast forward, the modifications and the exclusiveness were introduced to create groups and gain superiority over the other groups. In order to control a section of people gaining control over their mind is important. The cultures, faith and practices gave people a sense of hope during adverse time and it became their routine. Now to gain control over a section, people started to crush their mechanism of hope and that is where demolishing of older cultures by means of exclusiveness came into practice.

And as you mentioned the 6 Days of creation could very well be metaphorical. Mapping a day of God to that of Earth is most likely bringing the spatial locations into picture. When we say one day in another location in space is equivalent to 1000s of years elsewhere we really have to take into account the space-time dynamics in the equations.

@SW-User [quote]Basically this 6000 years theory revolves around Adam as a reference point. That makes previous 5 days of creation irrelevant. I am also surprised that Eve is not given much importance throughout the hierarchy.
From Biblical literature, I see that the feminine is merely represented as a helper to masculine. [/quote]

That is only a world view and not an accurate one at that. World views cannot change history.

@SW-User Thank you!

There seems to have been many migrations of people and ideas for a very long time so each society is very likely to have absorbed various myths and beliefs from each other. Especially around the Mediterranean, which had quite a variety around it.

We are not likely to know how deeply the leaders of the time thought about their policies and actions; but some of those movements were accompanied by various wars for power or territory.

Whatever the origins and intended meanings of the stranger stories in it, there is a strong thread in the OT of the Hebrew leaders trying to impose what we might now call a state religion, and that involved rooting out the old faiths such as that of Baal.

Not at first though: Baal was worshipped in much of the Middle East as the God of Fertility and of dew and rain, so vital in that region. He seems to have been something of a flexible deity, as different people saw and used him in their own ways. The early Israelites continued this for a while, in a rather demoted way as Lord of Israel; and the word even became a personal name-part, e.g. King Saul's son Ishbaal. Then Jezebel tried to introduce the Phoenician version of Baal as a rival to God, causing the Hebrews to turn against that belief and reduce the word "baal" to one of contempt. This happened around 9-8 hundred years BCE.
[i](Source: Encylopaedia Britannica) [/i]

Clearly, those chronicling their own history were keen to make themselves seem ever so good, but they also needed keep their society together, and a single God they could portray as a rather unpleasant tyrant when he chose was an ideal way to do so. Since they genuinely had no idea how the natural world works, beyond what can be observed obviously enough such as the Moon's phases or the Nile's annual floods, they had to fall back on accepting it all as God's work at His pleasure, so it would be a good idea not to upset Him.

Other cultures around the world had their own gods but roughly similar ideas. If the priestly caste, among the intelligentsia of their time, were savvy enough to work out what would happen, it was very advantageous to them to correlate a correctly-predicted event with having propitiated the right gods. It showed that the rites "obviously" worked and how clever are the priests. A simple example is that of frightening away the dragon eating the Sun or Moon, as the Chinese saw eclipses: their astronomers were able to predict them quite accurately, as well.

Tragically these rites in some societies included animal or even human sacrifices; and I think I'm right that to their credit the Hebrews did not use human sacrifices, and eventually put an end to sacrificing animals.

Prophecies are an extension of this idea - they "work" if you make the prophesy sufficiently vague and provide no clues of when and how it might happen.

Thank you @ArishMell . You have abstracted most of the historical practices.
In all, the inventions progressed according to the need of man. And Gods were invented too, having features in accordance with their respective cultures. It was a practice to invade less powerful kingdoms and widen the geography of ones own kingdom. Similarly I feel the fight for true God also started. Rituals and practices were evaluated and required approval to become eligible under the supreme God's terms and condition. Exploring and exploiting mindsets propelled the power hungry to define the narrative and characteristics of God. The range of God's character varied from warriors to victims. Gods were tested in accordance with human sentiments and sacrifice became a key feature.
Finally the one and only true God became heavily dependent on the power of His/Her follower's voice.

@ArishMell @SW-User [quote]Finally the one and only true God became heavily dependent on the power of His/Her follower's voice.[/quote]

You're guessing, guys, you have nothing as usual.