"Six Thousand Years with Ken Ham"

There is an unbroken list from church fathers such as Africanus. It is not analogous to baptism because everyone baptized. You agree with the Greeks, Hindus, atheists and deists.

 

Evolution is a concept of the Greeks and some say that they really got it from the Hindus. It and deep time were revived by the atheists and deists of the Enlightenment and now many Christians believe in old earth--probably because of the weakness of the American educational system. But I don't mean for that to sound so harsh but just to call attention to the origins of the idea, which predates Darwin, although he is one who rules from the grave in this case.

Here are a couple of paragraphs of others who thought that the world was created about four thousand years before Jesus:

"Ussher probably is best known for his conclusion that the Creation Week began on October 23, 4004 BC.1 In most people’s minds, this is the source of the common belief among biblical creationists that the world is only about 6000 years old. However Ussher was not the first, nor was he the only one, to attempt such a feat, for several contemporaries and near-contemporaries also computed ancient chronologies. Attempts to date creation this way predated Ussher by at least 15 centuries. In the second century AD, Rabbi Jose ben Halafta determined that the date of creation was 3761 BC. Also in the second century AD, Julius Africanus dated the creation to 5501 BC. The large discrepancy between these dates of creation mostly is due to the differences between the Septuagint and the Hebrew text of the Old Testament in the chronologies of Genesis 5 and 11. Africanus used the Septuagint, a decision that influenced many other early church chronologers, who reached similar dates for the creation. Eventually, the Hebrew text of the Old Testament became the preferred source. In AD 723 the Venerable Bede determined that the creation was in 3952 BC. Martin Luther thought that the creation was in 3960 BC, while his collaborator Philip Melanchton dated the creation to 3963 BC. John Lightfoot’s chronology often is confused with Ussher’s. Lightfoot published his work in 1644, just a few years before Ussher, in which he concluded that the creation was in 3929 BC. At least two astronomers weighed in: Isaac Newton determined that the creation was around 4000 BC, while Johannes Kepler concluded that the creation was in 3992 BC. This is just a small sample of various computations of the date of creation; Sexton (2015) recently has compiled several more sources with their various dates of creation.

"Jones (2005, 26) reproduced a table of dates of creation computed by various sources. One worthy of note is Joseph Justus Scaliger, who arrived at a creation date of 3949 BC. Scaliger is important, because he introduced the Julian period, a 7980 year cycle that began on January 1, 4713 BC, as an aid in computing chronologies. The Julian period is the product of three shorter cycles, the Roman indiction, the Metonic cycle, and the solar cycle. The Roman indiction period was a 15 year cycle of taxation in ancient Rome. This was useful in treating chronologies from the Roman period and shortly after. The Metonic cycle is a 19 year period over which lunar phases repeat on respective dates on the Julian calendar. This was useful in comparing dates on lunar or lunisolar calendars with dates on solar calendars. The solar cycle is the period of 28 years over which the days of the week repeat on the Julian calendar. This was helpful in determining which day of the week various dates fell upon. The number 19 from the Metonic period is prime, and the other two cycles are multiples of nearly different prime numbers, so the three cycles will repeat only after the product of all three cycles (7980 years). Scaliger arbitrarily selected the date of Sunday, January 1, 4713 BC as the starting point (treating the starting point as day zero, rather than day one), because it pre-dated all historical dates, so all dates in the Julian period would be positive. While intended as a convenient tool in comparing different calendars, the Julian period has other uses. In 1849 the astronomer John Herschel proposed the starting point of the Julian period as a basis of sequential numbering of days. Julian day number permits easy computation of the difference in time between any two dates. Astronomers find this particularly useful, such as in work with variable stars. Ussher expressed years in terms of BC/AD, Julian period (JP), and anno mundi (year of the world, AM)."

Comments on Ussher’s Date of Creation

Also, when the Enlightenment first put forth the idea of deep time to break the power of religion, the Church made a catastrophic mistake on Geology before Darwin, which Dr. Terry Mortenson points out in his masterful book first written as a thesis at Coventry The Great Turning Point.

Some English clergymen stood against deep time and Dr. Mortenson tells their stories and talked to some of their descendants. Some Americans stood against deep time but their names have been lost to history for the most part. When these men died, they were not replaced because geology fell into the hands of uniformitarians due to Hutton and Lyell among others and the Genesis Flood was doubted. So from roughly 1840 or 1850 until the 1960s, the church followed the old earth theory of dubious scientificity.

Dr. Morris and Dr. Whitcomb started a scientific movement for a young earth creation.

 

"Even Augustine cannot remotely be used in support of old-earth beliefs. Even though he allegorized the Days of Creation (and lots of other passages—he was no Hebrew scholar), he tried to compress the days into an instant, which is diametrically opposite to what long-agers claim!

"Furthermore, when ancient chronologies are researched, we find that many cultures, not just those based directly on the Bible, attest to an age for the creation of thousands of years. It seems that no serious scholar believed in the old-earth fashion of today. It is very much a modernist invention.

The following comes from Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Holy Bible, first published in 1879. Under ‘Creation’, Young listed dates of Creation compiled by a Dr William Hales,3 who was an expert in chronology. None of them give a date for Creation of more than 9,000 years ago. Note that dates of Creation dates from various non-Christian/non-Jewish sources (India, Egypt, China, pre-Christian Greece, Babylonia, etc.) all testify to an age of thousands of years.4 Furthermore, both Catholic and Protestant scholars agreed on this issue. It seems that no serious chronologist believed in an old earth."

Old-earth or young-earth belief - creation.com

This link has a table of various people who believed in a young earth.

 

"One of the chapters in his City of God bears the title “On the mistaken view of history that ascribes many thousands of years to the age of the earth.” Would you like it clearer? Several pagan philosophers at the time believed that the earth was more or less eternal. Countless ages had preceded us, with many more to come. Augustine said they were wrong."

" Early Church leaders like Origen, Augustine and Basil were young earth creationists. This view was commonly held within the Church until the 19th century (including Aquinas, Bede, the fourth Lateran council in AD 1215 and Pius X). The Catholic2 Church of all times and places embraced the traditional doctrine of Creation from the day of Pentecost until the Enlightenment. In the Roman Catholic Church this even continued until the Great War. But after the Enlightenment, darkness reigned. Miracles disappeared. Divinity became part of the humanities. Divine revelation was doubted or outright denied. Human religiosity was the new object. Theology became a science that explained the Bible as if there never was Divine intervention in history. Mythology, comparative religion and egalitarianism were the new keys of interpretation. There was no revelation, but a democratic process where earliest Christianity produced ideas about Jesus and decided what to think about God, creating a god after our likeness. The seeds were sown in 17th century philosophy and the political changes of the French revolution. The implications become fully visible in the 19th century. Especially from the early part of that century onward the natural sciences started to filter out God as a relevant factor. We observe a similar move in continental theology around the same time."

Augustine young earth creationist - creation.com

 

"It would seem then that there was a widely held belief in a recent creation during the few centuries following the events of Christ’s life on Earth. This was linked to a millennial scheme where the six days of creation prefigured 6,000 years of Earth history, followed be a millennial seventh ‘day’ of rest. Such millennial schemes are found in the writing of Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Hippolytus, Theophilus, and Basil. By the fourth century, Basil continued to uphold a belief in a literal creation as opposed to a purely figurative one, and this literal–symbolic interpretation was present in the writing of Augustine also. Augustine believed in both a recent creation and a global Flood, but saw symbolism relating to the person and work of Christ throughout the Old Testament. Augustine seems to have believed that God made everything at once in the recent past, but he did not believe in millions of years of change. Later (in The City of God), this belief was seemingly modified as he tried to come to terms with six literal days, but he continued to think that the light of days 1 to 3 might have been spiritual light from the heavenly city as opposed to physical light. Finally, we may observe that modern young-earth creationism is recognizably similar to the teachings of the Church Fathers, even if differing in some places, and is not a radical departure from Christian tradition."

Creation millennium church fathers - creation.com

 

Thank you! Here is some back-up for what you said.

Influence for the symbolic linkage between the six days of creation and the six thousand years until the millennial reign of rest may have been passed down directly from the Apostles, especially John, the author of Revelation. Irenaeus, who lived during the 2nd century ad, claims to have received the teaching from Papias and Polycarp, who received it directly from John.2 Peter 3:8) and that the Christians should be patient regarding the question of Christ’s return. However, it is less clear whether Peter was specifically making a millennial link here, or just a general point about God’s timeframe in relation to our own. Bearing in mind Christ’s injunction not to be over-concerned with times and dates (Acts 1:7), Peter might then have been only making a general point. A millennial scheme is also present in the early Epistle of Barnabas (probably written AD 70–100).

Creation millennium church fathers - creation.com

 

Technically it happened just before Darwin due to confusion about the new science of geology and Hutton and Lyell and others formulating uniformitarianism. Uniformitarianism is disrupted by a catastrophic violent global flood that laid down dead plants and animals in rapidly formed layers. In other words, as you know, the sedimentary rocks are the graveyard of billions of animals destroyed in the flood. But this mistake happened just before Darwin. Grand Canyon is thought to have been formed in a couple of weeks or a month when trapped flood waters broke free and raced to the ocean. Deep time says lots of time and a little bit of water; YECs say lots of water and a little bit of time..

 

The Enlightenment, now discredited, swept Europe. There was the horrible French Revolution. Then there were hard times and lack of education. Darwin's family was prominent and his wife, a cousin, was heir to the Wedgewood china enterprise, still in business since 1759. So Darwin started at the top. The geologist were mostly self-taught until the science finally showed up in university offerings.