Six Thousand Years Old

If we are speaking of the age of the world as mankind currently perceives it—with all our science and mathematics and literature and art and engineering and astronomy and so on—then the creationists are certainly being far more accurate in their dating techniques than the evolutionists are. Six thousand years ago, this species had made considerable progress stepping in off the hunter-gatherer’s grassy plain, but still lived much nearer to that plain than to the current forms of modern civilization. In Mesopotamia, in Egypt, in India, in China, dazzling flowers were on the verge of bloom, transformations our scientists still have not characterized accurately, the transformations having overwhelmed our scientists’ means. To say that the world was created almost miraculously starting around six thousand years ago would not be pressing credulity any appreciable degree—not if we are regarding that world through the gaze of our own eyes.

If the scientists can take any consolation from their miscalculation, it is that only they recognize flowers must have a context in which to bloom: to deny the steadfast background of the soil is no better than to suppress wonderment at the germination of the seed. The mistake of the creationists has been to ignore the very real context upon which this planet’s miraculous transformation took place, and the mistake of the scientists has been to remain dogmatically blind to the fact an anti-evolutionary transformation occurred at all.