9781422277607

he produced far more evidence—good, solid factual evidence in its favor—than anyone else before or since. His theory was more precise and more exciting than that: it showed how evolution had actually worked and how the processes of natural selection were still working to produce new species every day. People who were opposed to evolution, who had been able to write off Erasmus Darwin’s ideas as moonshine, had to take Charles Darwin’s carefully thought-out arguments far more seriously. And they were arguments with frightening implications. If Darwin was right, it followed that man was a product of nature and not a special creation of God. It could follow that natural selection was still working, and that man might one day be eliminated too. Perhaps the whole universe was Ussher’s Chronology Over the centuries, Christians developed various systems in an attempt to date Biblical events. One of the most ambitious of these was Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti (“Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world”), a history created by the Anglican archbishop of Ireland, the Reverend James Ussher, in 1650. Ussher used genealogies of Adam, Noah, Abraham, and other legendary figures mentioned in the Bible, along with other dates given in the scriptures, to determine that the world had been created in 4004 bce , and that the Great Flood had occurred in 2348 bce . He dated the events of Exodus, when Moses led the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt, to 1491 bce . Ussher’s chronology, giving a date of about 4,000 years before the birth of Jesus, was in line with other Biblical chronologies of the time. By the mid-eighteenth century, greater scientific understanding of minerals and geological strata caused some people to question the

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