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Who Begat Climate Change?
There is time and then there is geological time. Like many concepts scientists find convenient, geological time has suffered from perceived conflicts with sacred myths. Scoffing at the myths is easy when they are the myths of powerless people. When the myths are based in the sacred texts of Islam (in parts of the world) or Christianity (in other parts of the world), scientific challenge has come at the risk of careers or even lives.
The scientific analysis of geological time conflicts with a literal reading of texts claimed to be messages from God by all three Abrahamic faiths. Protestant Christians, in particular, have calculated the beginning of time from the generations set out in that part of the Bible skeptics call “the begats.”
In the New Testament, the begats set out in the Old Testament serve the purpose of connecting Jesus to the House of David, a necessary lineage for the Messiah. In Genesis 5, the begats set out the exact life spans of many Jewish generational patriarchs. The best known would be Methuselah, who lived 969 years.
Skeptics go off on questions like causes of death and how Mrs. Cain and Mrs. Abel showed up, but the some of the faithful take the years of each of the patriarchs literally and add them together to get the age of Mother Earth, since Genesis purports to begin with the creation of the planet itself. These myths…
