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Featured every Sunday in the
Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN
October 20, 2002 Issue

Measuring Eternity
The Search for the Beginning of Time
By Martin Gorst

The History of the Quest for Eternity and the Beginning of Time
It was the title of an otherwise unassuming and smallish book huddling between larger ones on the new book shelf that caught my attention - "Measuring Eternity, The Search for the Beginning of Time" by Martin Gorst.

"When did the universe begin?" asks the author in the first chapter. "For the quest to measure the span of the world's existence is", he writes, "the point where science and belief merge or clash fatally." But the book is not about the explosive and controversial topic of the Creation itself. It is a completely impartial chronological account of all the different philosophies and theories about the beginning of time that have existed through the ages. It is a history of the development of human thought and the life stories of the theologians, philosophers, scientists, mathematicians and madmen who, through textual or scientific research have developed the various ideas on that topic. It is details in the lives of these eccentric, and often fanatical individual thinkers that make the book interesting and exciting.

Ancient pre-Christian civilizations, with the exception of the Hebrew civilization on whose scripture the Christian belief of the Creation is based, "believed that the universe had existed forever," writes Gorst. "Instead of having a beginning, time was thought to consist of endless eras, repeated over and over again for eternity." The beliefs of the early Christian church regarding this topic were not clearly defined and mixed Hebrew scripture and the belief of the ancient civilizations.

The sacking of Rome by the Goths in 410 A.D. compelled St. Augustine to start his famous "The City of God" in which he proclaimed, "God created the world and time together."

The next person of significance to tackle this topic was the Irish bishop James Ussher (1581 - 1656). For twenty years he slaved over the research for his 2,000 page-long "The Annals of the World". Ussher is famous for pinpointing the actual date of Creation -Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C.

To arrive at this precise date Ussher, a theologian scholar, relied on textual evidence and his interpretation of it. Using the Bible, he added up the genealogy dates of Adam's and Eve's descendants up to Abraham as well as all the other relevant dates provided in the Bible.

The time of the year the Creation occurred was also a point of contention and controversy in the early Christian church. Most theologians believed that the world was created during one of the solstices or one of the equinoxes. But which one became a topic of endless arguments. Initially most theologians opted for the spring equinox as the season of birth and rebirth. By Ussher's time people were beginning to believe that because the Garden of Eden had been full of ripe fruit ready for harvesting, God must have created the universe during the autumn equinox. And this is the belief that Ussher adopted. He also believed that it was a given that God would have created the world on the first day of the week - Sunday. "I have observed that the Sunday, which in the year 4004 B.C. aforesaid," wrote Ussher, "came nearest the Autumnal Aequinox, by Astronomical Tables, happened upon the 23rd day of the Julian October."

But he also believed that time had begun at a somewhat different and earlier moment. This belief was based on verses from Genesis suggesting to Ussher that the "first day began with evening," hence time was created on October 22, 4004 at 6:00 p.m.

Next came the Calvinist nobleman Isaac La Peyrere who in 1641 foolishly petitioned Richelieu to allow him to publish his treatise "Men Before Adam". Needless to say his petition was denied and La Peyrere had to move to Antwerp to escape persecution.

Slightly earlier, at a trial in 1633, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei had been condemned for publishing his belief that the Earth was not flat and actually traveled around the sun. (Galilei's sentence was rescinded in 1992, 359 years later). In spite of this, which threw all scientists into a state of paranoia, in 1655 with the help of Queen Christina (who had abdicated her Swedish throne by then) La Peyrere was finally able to have his book published and with this get into deeper trouble.

For La Peyrere claimed that Adam was only "the founder of the Jewish race" and that other peoples and races had been created earlier. For documentation he cited discrepancies in the Bible such as "how did Adam's son Cain find a wife unless there were already women in the world" as well as Chaldean, Egyptian and Chinese historical accounts that predated Adam's and Eve's existence. So heretical were La Peyrere's ideas that in 1656 he was arrested and ordered to apologize to the Pope if he wanted to be forgiven.

Next came the Jesuit missionary to China Father Martino Martini who found it difficult to convert the Chinese to Catholicism in the face of the discrepancies between Chinese historical chronology and that of the Bible.

Enter Descartes (1596 - 1650) - "a short nervous Frenchman" whose philosophies predate Ussher's "Annals of the World". Today Descartes' enormous contributions to mathematics (especially analytic geometry) and philosophy (especially rationalism) are irrefutable. But back then his now famous "I think, therefore I exist (or "I am")" caused a tremendous furor.

The history that follows is more familiar - Newton, Hubble, scientific and astronomical research and discoveries, space travel. For the most part, today we have come to allow the existence of divergent ideas about the beginning of time and the universe. Yet, the reading of this book makes one wonder how did human thought manage to survive and flourish in the face of such severe persecution.

I have a running argument with a friend who maintains that persecution is essential for individual thinking to flourish and that once complete freedom of thought is achieved, the challenge to think independently is removed and people become complacent lemmings. Could he be right?

Ophelia Georgiev Roop
Library Director
San Bernardino Public Library

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