Caroline Winterer

We're going to get our calculators or our abacuses, you know, whatever, sheets of paper, and we're going to add up all of the generations and the begats and whatever dates we can find.

And we're going to come up with this number.

And 4004 B.C., in fact, it's October 23rd, 4004 B.C.

on a Saturday night.

is determined by James Usher, an Irish archbishop, to be the age of the earth as he declares it in 1660.

So this is sort of floating around for a couple hundred years as authoritative science, right?

It's religion, but it's also science at a time that people didn't see a conflict between the two worlds.

But it's only in the course of the 19th century when people are intensively coming into contact with the ground underneath their feet because of the Industrial Revolution.

And over the course of various digging programs, you know, trying to find fertile soil in New Jersey.

Calcium carbonate in rich soil because they've exhausted the soil after 200 years of colonization.

Again, the fossil fuels of the coal forests, stratum that is today called the carboniferous era.

It's very, very long ago.

They begin to be just confronted from all sides.

with the fact that this could really not have happened super quickly without a critical thing, which is a miracle.

And they are now also in the business of denying miracles, right?

They're starting to imagine that the earth is disenchanted.

that maybe God put the earth into motion, but he's certainly not reaching into our daily lives, you know, saying, here's a comet, here's a flood, you know, as they might have imagined before.

And so that's why uniformitarianism, this idea of slow, you know, boring, non-catastrophic changes becomes a substitute for catastrophic flood stories like the story of Noah.

Oh, that was so real.

Americans enter the American Revolution with this terminal inferiority complex relative to Europe because, you know, boom, 1776.