In most copies of the Bible, the number "4004" is printed at the top of the first page of Genesis. But nowhere in the text of the Bible do I find the assertion that this was the year in which God created the heavens and the earth. So where did this idea—that the all of this was created 4,004 years before the birth of Christ come from? Especially since NOW we are informed that Jesus was born in the year 4 B.C. That would seem to throw the whole system off by four years.

Since this date of 4004 cannot be found in the text of any of the books of the Bible, who came up with this figure? Is this some kind of Heavenly copyright date? Who put it there? And when was it put there?

The whole Young Earth Creationist canon seems to be based on this number.

I submit that the Cosmos is at least 13 billion years old, as the lasted scientific findings—backed by plenty of observable evidence—tells us. And the solar system, including the Earth, was created out of swirling eddies of cosmic dust—which, as we now know, is the way stars and their planetary systems are formed—some 4.5 billion years ago.

Our sun is a second or third generation star, which means that the gas cloud from which it and the planets formed included a quantity of heavy atoms and molecules "cooked" in the cores of earlier stars that, by various means including going supernova, blew their material into space to reform into new stars.

Given all these organic (carbon containing) molecules, a medium such as water, and an energy source such as the heat of the sun, they combine in various ways and form micro-organisms. And these micro-organisms in turn tend to combine in various ways and produce even more complex organisms. Simple but living creatures such as the amoeba and other one-celled animals. And algae, the beginnings of plant life.

This is when the process of evolution begins. Those living creatures that can survive well in their medium proliferated, genes combine and recombine in various ways, and these living creatures grow even more complex and sophisticated.

We are the result. And we reside in a Cosmos so awe-inspiringly immense that the mind boggles at trying to take it all in. Indeed, the human mind can't really grasp it.

Assuming that the Cosmos was actually created by some intelligent entity, something or someone we call "God," He, She, or IT is so far beyond our comprehension that there is no way that anyone can grasp Its nature and intent, much less claim to understand "the Will of God."

But some people, suffering from a form of conceptual agoraphobia (All that space! All that time!) become frightened at the true nature of the Cosmos. So they construct a much cozier concept of the world for themselves. Back to childhood. Their house and their neighborhood is all they know, having no real concept of the size of the town or city they live in, much less the size of the world they live on. They are taken care of by parents. A father who is kindly and benevolent because he provides (giving us this day our daily bread), but who can be a stern disciplinarian ("Thou shalt not—"), but who forgives us our trespasses.

Warm and fuzzy.

Comparing the god of the Young Earth Creationists with the (presumed) God who created the Cosmos as it IS, along with the Laws of Nature that resulted in the emergence of Life, which over eons of time and experiments of evolution eventually resulted in US, the god of the Young Earth Creationists is little more than some sort of "super-wizard." Gandalf on steroids.

The god of the Young Earth Creationists is much too small.

Don Firth