God's to do list for Sat Oct 22nd, 4004 BC
- 6:00 pm: Create the world and start time.
- 6:30 pm: Turn on the light.
- 7:00 pm: Watch Andromeda.
- 8:00 pm: Go to bed, got a lot of creating to do in the morning.
Oct 22nd, 4004 BC is the date that
Bishop James Ussher came up with as the closest Saturday to the
autumnal equinox in a calculation of the age of the world based on
The Bible. This date is religious dogma and dismissed by the scientific community.
However, you may be interested in how it was determined. Ussher started by calculating the length of time the events in the bible took. In this there is difficulties because there are several versions of the bible. Once he had determined which version to use, he related the events listed with other chronologies on the basis of solar and lunar eclipses. He was also guided by the Talmudic prophecy that the world will last 6000 years: the first 2000 are void, the middle 2000 is the time of the Torah and the last 2000 is the time of the Messiah.
Once the year was established, the date needed to be determined. It was generally accepted that God would have started at one of the cardinal points of the sun: the vernal and autumnal equinoxes or the winter or summer solstices. The autumnal equinox was chosen because of the fact that Eden had fruit on the trees when Adam and Eve were there.
You may wonder why Oct 22nd since the autumnal equinox normally occurs September 21st or 22nd of each year. This is because he lived in the mid 1600's so used the Julian Calendar and I have to assume the date was not adjusted when England switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1751.
It is generally thought that God started on a Sunday but in the version of the bible Ussher used, it says "And the evening and the morning were the first day." Ussher took this sentence to mean that the first day began with the evening. In later years, commentators ignored this refinement and have used October 23rd, 4004 BC.