and its implications for our spiritual empowerment
by Miceal Ledwith
Most people know that, for several centuries, Jewish and Christian believers in the West were firmly convinced the universe was created six-thousand-years-ago. But what is not often realized is the extent to which this conviction and its companion set of beliefs still act as a major stumbling block in the way of being able to create the kind of reality we wish to experience every day. People everywhere are making valiant efforts to escape from the web of fables we have been spun for millennia. What we now know about human origins has an enormous amount of evidence that will empower that present-day journey.
It’s been over 350 years since the Irish Archbishop James Ussher and the Cambridge professor John Lightfoot tried to calculate the age of the world, based largely on the evidence in the Bible. In my own theology lectures years ago, the students would always laugh when I mentioned that Ussher and Lightfoot had calculated the world was created in the year 4004 BC on October 23 at 9:00 AM.
That was fine as a tool for an undergraduate lecture designed to awaken students to the fact that things were seldom as they seem. Nevertheless, the efforts of Ussher and Lightfoot were very creditable achievements for their time. The usual ridicule to which they are subjected is often mainly due to an unfortunate small-mindedness about the circumstance of a past that was “all so unimaginably different” in terms of lacking perspectives and information which we take for granted today.
To create such a chronology was no small achievement. The Bible as we have it today was assembled from many different manuscript sources, over a long period of time during the Middle Ages, and besides there are many gaps in the chronologies of the Bible texts themselves. So it was not just a simple matter of adding up the ages of all the significant people in the Bible between the creation and Jesus Christ. Extensive cross checking with many other sources outside the Bible was necessary in order to establish that chronology.
It was largely due to an accident of history that Ussher’s chronology became so well known and accepted worldwide for there were already half a dozen other such chronologies equally well based, such as the chronology of Bede, Sir Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler. However, the new authorized English translation of the Bible that was to gradually become known as “The King James Version” had appeared only a few decades before and was only really attaining universal influence by the middle of the seventeenth century. After Ussher’s calculations were published in 1650, the various printings of the King James Bible worldwide began to insert Ussher’s chronology into the margins of the text of the Bible itself. So it happened that before long those calculations themselves began to assume the very status of Holy Writ in people’s minds. For centuries, this effectively barred any significant inquiry into the dating of human origins in a more scientific way.
That was an extremely unfortunate situation as a true understanding of the circumstances of our origins is crucial in order to assume that power and strength which is the goal of our life’s experience on this Earth. As the years passed, open-minded researchers found enormous problems in trying to reconcile Ussher’s calculation of a six-thousand-year-old creation with the new facts about human origins that were beginning to emerge. Many saw the efforts of these researchers as nothing more than an attempt to edge God out of his own universe.
By the dawn of the 19th century, geology had calculated that life must have existed on earth for at least 250 million years. And this was long before any theory of evolution ever saw the light of day. Enormous clashes punctuated the early 19th century between the geologists and those who curiously accepted that belief in God stood or fell with the accuracy of Ussher’s chronology.
When Darwin’s theory of evolution appeared, the issue of the age of the universe took a back seat in the priorities of believers, as they now had much more immediate crises on their hands. In place of the “God explanation,” Darwin appeared to offer a much more reasonable mechanism by which life might have appeared, even though he never endorsed atheism or agnosticism in any shape or form.
Science’s continuing attempts to date the creation continued to place the date farther and farther back in history until finally in 2003 NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave probe calculated the age of the universe to be 13.7 billion years, with a margin of error of only two percent. Twelve years ago, a study of the human Y chromosome indicated the human race appeared between 50,000-250,000 years ago.
The present stage of research today inclines to a date well over 200-millennia-ago. In addition, it is crucial to note the human race appeared very abruptly, at least in geological and anthropological terms. After a period of well over a million years in which there had been no progress, humans suddenly increased their brain capacity by half, developed the physiological changes needed to facilitate speech and assumed our modern biological make-up. How did this happen?
The suddenness of this appearance has posed enormous problems for anthropology and geology for years. It is only recently that more plausible explanations have been forthcoming. In biblical research, many astute commentators had also long realized than the Book of Genesis was never intended to be a textbook of science, which also provided a detailed chronology of the earliest days of human and world history. Today, it is much easier to understand what Genesis actually was talking about, which is wildly at variance with what both traditional style beliefs and traditional science had assumed was its message.
By now, I believe it must be clear to any serious researcher there really has never yet been a serious debate between religious belief and science, but only between caricatures of each. But all these major problems posed by scientific advances in anthropology, biblical studies, archaeology and geology were only the beginning. In 1849, a massive collection of inscribed clay tablets in the ruins of the library of King Assurbanipal at Nineveh was discovered. That collection began to unfold a story whose remarkable implications about understanding who we really were only emerged gradually, and that was well into the mid-twentieth-century. Scattered throughout the museums of the world are over a quarter million tablets from Mesopotamia that go back more than five thousand years in human history. Many of them tell a remarkably different version of how the human race came to be than we were familiar with. And now it appears some of our most sacred texts in the Bible may actually have been modelled on these earlier ‘pagan’ works, principally the Book of Genesis.
Parallel to this research into the ancient texts, many practical archaeological discoveries and investigations were taking place at almost all the so-called sacred sites throughout the world. This research raised many obvious puzzling questions. How could such advanced technologies have come into existence in so many different places all over the world at the same time, and with no obvious means of communication between them as far as our records of the time went? These obvious questions were nothing in terms of impact compared to the less obvious ones that were now coming to the surface.
Over the past 10 years in particular, archaeological investigations in South Africa have given us a much more expanded understanding of the ancient peoples who walked this earth a quarter-million years ago. Now, it begins to appear they may have been the designers and engineers of our physical bodies. Obviously, to many fields in traditional science, all of this was a minefield. It was even more so to the traditional religions, who were now being asked to accept the hypothesis that the God of the traditional religions may have actually been a flesh and blood being, however advanced in technology.
Many of the all too human-style attributes of God that we read of in the sacred Jewish and Christian texts – and that have always been the stock-in-trade of church preaching – anger, displeasure at disobedience, punishment, fickleness, vengeance and the desire to be worshipped, now take on a very different appearance indeed. The whole elaborate structure in which we believed we exist – a life of moral testing, a redemption worked for us by Jesus from the consequences of our sin, the need for repentance, and a punishment or reward for eternity after death; all these and many another web of fables grew around such an all too human figure. It must be said such a caricature of God can have nothing to do with the real thing. Similarly, such a caricature of human destiny and purpose based on this kind of caricature of God has nothing to do with reality either and this is a much more serious matter. It took a long time for us to recognize how bizarre those beliefs really were. But the real tragedy is not that, but the fact that those beliefs have totally crippled our ability to manifest. Furthermore, the routine religious practices put forward by the religions compound that, crippling all afresh.
Establishing the truth about the circumstances of humanity’s origin has amassed a body of knowledge that has proven to be very unsettling to many, but those people who are open and perceptive have begun to see that for the first time, we now have the opportunity to understand where we really came from. What is even more important is that we now know in truth what it was we came here to do. This is a far more important issue than establishing the date of the creation of mankind, but establishing that date was a crucial step along the way that gave us a whole new vision of our place in creation. Had we been imprisoned in the conviction of a six- thousand-year-old creation, we could have never have become open to the new discoveries about reality that have come to light in recent times and we could never have drawn the implications from that for our understanding of God and of human destiny and purpose.
It opened the door to understandings of major significance: how did we get here? Who are we really and what it is possible for us to do? Is this universe all that exists or are there other dimensions of reality? Given what we know about the structure of what exists, is there any real justification for a radical division such as we have had for so long between matter and spirit or between the natural and the supernatural? Are they not, after all, and however different from each other, only different stages along one continuum of reality? Was Jesus’s promise that we could do all the miracles that he did meant to be taken literally after all?
Or will fear, guilt and the need to be taken care of ultimately defeat the opening up to those new potentials within the human person which now, with the new understanding of our origins and later history, we have come to realize we have? Ultimately, this is the greatest hurdle we have to overcome. People are willing to sacrifice almost anything except the belief in a benevolent “Parent in the Skies,” who has taken the place of the beloved parents they were lucky enough to have during childhood. This really is the last great test. The real truth is when we are willing to move out of those beliefs that offer such spurious and deceptive comfort, it is only then we can access a power and ability that can take greater care of us than any imaginary “Benevolent Being in the Skies” ever could.
That power is the gateway through which humanity can open into real abilities and freedom and creativity in manifestation, in which there can be no more room for lack, fear, guilt, troubles, sickness, crying or sorrow, but only emergence into the freedom and power of what, all along, was our birthright.
I will be exploring these issues in greater depth at our conference March 4-5 at the Delta Airport Hotel in Richmond, Vancouver, along with the complimentary presentations of my colleagues Michael Cremo and Jeffrey Armstrong.
