Deep time, pre-history and recorded history
Geoff and I have just finalised and published Origin. Needless to say, the long months of editing resulted in a fair bit of material floating down to the cutting room floor. Much of it was passably interesting, we felt, even if slightly off-topic, and eventually an oft-heard refrain accompanying the excision of otherwise useful prose was: “Make it a blog post”. So here we go.
At one point, Geoff’s interest was piqued by a comment Richard Dawkins made in a public discussion with Lawrence Krauss, (viewable on YouTube, from 6:25–6:42). Here’s the comment:
… 50 per cent [of the population] … think that the world is 6000 years old. And … if you actually work out the scale of the error, it’s equivalent to believing that the distance from New York to San Francisco is 7.8 yards.
Naturally, the audience erupted in laughter at this comment – who would be crazy enough to believe that? But Geoff pointed out that these disagreements on the past occur mainly where the results are coloured by differing worldviews. When we get to a position on the past that is less influenced by worldview, that is, recorded history, the agreement between the Bible and secular accounts are notable. Here’s a brief categorisation of “history” – which is, after all, an umbrella term encompassing various possible meanings:
- Deep time: This is the type of history that Dawkins was referring to. The timescale is billions of years, which is not accepted by young-earth creationists like us. The salient points here are that timespans are indirectly inferred, for the simple reason that people were not around to measure them; and that these inferences are based on the presuppositions of a particular worldview. Ergo, the notion of deep time is largely philosophic in nature, something which Dawkins didn’t tell his audience. Here’s a few more things he didn’t specify: deep time relies on the interpretive framework of philosophical uniformitarianism which is consonant with atheism, materialism and secular humanism. A rigid philosophical uniformitarian interpretation of scientific evidence conflicts with the biblical worldview and origins account. Crucially, from Dawkins’ perspective, acceptance of deep time lends plausibility to evolutionary schemes.
- Pre-history: This is history that is said to have occurred before written records were made. The Bible doesn’t support this as a universal concept, because written records were certainly made prior to the global flood. The first verse of Genesis 5 declares, “[t]his is the book of the genealogy of Adam” (NKJV). Note the word “book”; it is as if Moses, the writer, was incorporating an earlier written record into Genesis at this point—one which conceivably could have been written by Adam himself. Phrases like “prehistoric man” carry the nuance of an evolutionary “caveman” narrative, in which man is on an upwards trajectory, and if we go back far enough, beyond recorded history, we find that man was too primitive to write. But the Bible shows us that not only was there writing pre-flood, but men made and used musical instruments (Genesis 4:20) and crafted items in bronze and iron (Genesis 4:22). Concepts like “prehistoric man” and “the stone age” are not robustly supported by the Bible.
- Recorded history: as the name suggests, this is history that is attested to by written records from a current or past civilization. Recorded history tends to be accepted by everyone because it is less influenced by philosophical presuppositions. And this is the type of history that accords well with what we read in Genesis. Secular academics recognise recorded history as stretching back to Sumer; a biblical view could hold that Sumer was an early post-flood civilization. (Before the flood, recorded history is very sparse indeed. The only information we have in relation to the pre-diluvian era is several chapters at the beginning of Genesis and a large collection of flood myths including the Epic of Gilgamesh.)
A study in recorded history that, in principle, could be accepted by secularists as well as creationists is History Begins at Sumer: Twenty-five Firsts in Man’s Recorded History (1956), written by Assyriologist S. N. Kramer. Kramer identifies the unique vantage point of his field of study: the “Sumerologist, more than most other scholars and specialists, is in a position to satisfy man’s universal quest for origins—for “firsts” in the history of civilisation.” (Introduction, p. xvii, 1959 edition). This is because the Sumerians were the first to invent “a usable and effective system of writing” (p. xviii).
Kramer notes that the Sumerian writing system began “about five thousand years ago”. This date accords roughly with the notion of Sumer being an early post-flood civilisation: if we combine Ussher’s dating of the creation (4004 B.C.) with the fact that the global flood occurred 1656 years after the creation week, then the flood occurred some 4373 years ago. (Well, there’s a few centuries difference there, depending on the accuracy of Ussher’s estimate and what Kramer means by “about five thousand years”.) And what was the world like at that point? The Sumer events recorded on those early clay tablets may have occurred shortly after the Babel events, a time when neighbouring people groups of the Middle East would have had different languages. Was it the need for rudimentary communications with neighbouring groups that prompted the Sumerians to begin writing with pictographs? Kramer informs us that Sumerian writing metamorphosed into a phonetic system over the next several centuries. Perhaps, as the Sumerian population grew and developed, the emphasis shifted to more robust communication within the Sumerian people group, resulting in a changed writing style.
And what do we learn from Sumerian writings? Here’s Kramer on the first Sumerian schools:
The Sumerian school was a direct outgrowth of the invention and development of the cuneiform system of writing, Sumer’s most significant contribution to civilization. The first written documents were found in a Sumerian city named Erech. They consist of more than a thousand small pictographic clay tablets inscribed with bits of economic and administrative memoranda. But among them are several which contain word lists intended for study and practice. That is, as early as 3000 B.C., some scribes were already thinking in terms of teaching and learning (p. 1).
To the Bible student, the Sumerian city of “Erech” may sound familiar. Kramer provides some extra detail about this city:
The city-state in which An had his main seat of worship was called Uruk, or, as it is vocalized in the Bible, Erech, a city which played a pre-eminent political role in the history of Sumer (p. 90).
Genesis 10:10 records that Erech was one of the cities founded by Nimrod: “the beginning of [Nimrod’s] kingdom was Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.” (NKJV)
What we have in view from this brief discussion is that the Bible lines up roughly with secular recorded history—in timeframe, in at least one place name, and in the fact that the trail of recorded history goes cold shortly after the global flood.
But Dawkins ignored all these considerations during his discussion with Krauss. He probably likes to avoid any discussion which focuses attention on the agreement between the Bible and recorded history. Perhaps he doesn’t want his audience to wonder why there are only “about five thousand years” of recorded history when “modern humans” are said to have evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago. Perhaps that yawning gap is why evolutionists like to emphasise the concept of “prehistoric man”. We surmise that evolutionists like Dawkins are most comfortable dwelling on other types of history, like deep time (while keeping quiet about its philosophic underpinnings).