Odd this day

22 October — so it must be the universe’s 6,027th birthday, as calculated by James Ussher, 17th century Archbishop of Armagh, and (confusingly) the 19th anniversary of a conference at the Geological Society of London ‘celebrating’ the 6,000th birthday.

Ussher published his findings on the date of divine creation in Annales veteris testament (Annals of the Old Testament), and, in the words of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

Of all Ussher’s works this was the one that gained most international recognition … this was hardly surprising, since it provided a convincing answer to the great theological and cosmological question of the day — the date of the foundation of the world. What Ussher did was to exploit his vast knowledge of ancient languages, calendars, and history and match it to his biblical scholarship to construct a comprehensive chronology which linked together biblical and ancient history. Then, once the Bible was firmly anchored in history, he could count backwards from known biblical dates, through the internal chronology of the Bible, back to Adam.

Admittedly, ODNB does go on to say that

To modern writers, for whom the premiss is ridiculous, Ussher’s work seems both fanciful and pedantic in the extreme.

If you accept the premise, though, it’s “a highly impressive piece of scholarship”. (As is so often the case, that tiny word ‘if’ is being forced to support many times its own body weight. If you were a child in Britain in the 1970s, you will know what I mean when I say ‘if’ is truly the Precious McKenzie of English words.)

I may have digressed slightly. Basically, Archbishop Ussher carried out

meticulous calibration of biblical events with those in ancient secular history [and] established 23 October 4004 BC as the date of creation.

…and then pedantically realised that time must have begun the night before, because the Bible said that “the evening and the morning were the first day”.

Which made the ‘correct’ date and time, 6pm on the 22nd. Yes, at the risk of further digression, I, too, am reminded of:

Anyway, the geologists chose the anniversary for “a day-long conference on some of the fakes, frauds and hoaxes that have plagued geological and palaeontological research for centuries”, and — despite the temptation to emulate the Geographers’ Guild in Paddington…

…they elected to raise a glass to the man because

It’s not that we think Archbishop Ussher’s date was a fraud. It’s just that it was spectacularly wrong.

As journalist Tim Radford points out, though, the geographers were also out, just not by as much: