ARA Review by Harpalycus of The Biblical Clock

[Harpalycus]

[Following is an OnlineBookClub.org ARA Review of the book, The Biblical Clock.]

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2 out of 5 stars

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The Biblical Clock. Daniel Friedmann and Diana Sheldon. 2019.

This is an ambitious attempt to show that the Genesis account is consistent with accepted scientific dating, relying upon the Jewish Kabbala to provide the key that unlocks the information. It then links the days of creation with history from a messianic point of view based on the Commentary of Rabbi Moses ben Nahman (1194-1270), leading to the culmination of the Divine Plan in the End of Days (complete with a useful timetable). It seems no coincidence that it is divided into twelve chapters.

This is a book for the believer seeking buttresses to their faith or the afficionado of the wilder reaches of human ingenuity. In some ways it is impressive, tackling some complex ideas with a good degree of clarity and leavening its dry content with a series of imaginatively constructed and quite nicely written vignettes that introduce various characters in the chronological development of the ideas and frame Friedmann’s own research. Even quite a lot of illustrations that are nice to look at though none too instructive.

Ultimately, however, it is a book promulgating a ‘theory’ and needs to be judged on its content. Superficially, it seems, at the least, an intriguing hypothesis, but it doesn’t take long to recognise the cracks in its structure, based as it is upon unwarranted assumptions, incomplete or even absence of source citation, the selective use of data and imaginative interpretations.

The introductory hypothesis is that scientific and biblical chronology are in impressive accordance and that the biblical date of the creation of Earth is, incredibly, the same as the given age according to science.

This is based partly on Psalm 90:4, ‘For a thousand years in your sight are like a day (that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night)’ taking it to literally means that a day of God’s is a thousand of our years. This ignores the fact that this is not what it says. When Burns declares his love is like a red, red rose, I can’t imagine he really means she has thorns. That this is merely a simile is emphasised by the words in brackets, which were conveniently and quietly dropped.

The authors then ‘find’ in the mystical Kabbala that creation involves a cycle of seven ages of seven thousand years each (with absolutely no information as to the basis of this claim). By multiplying the whole lot together, it is calculated that the sun, created at the end of the fourth creation day, would be 4.79 billion years old (wow, science estimates between 4.57 to 4.8 billion – impressive).

Then life begins in water at the beginning of the fifth day, making it 3.52bya, nicely corresponding to 3.5bya as the scientific estimate. But why the beginning of day 5, when the sun was dated at the end of day 4? If life in water is dated from the end of day 5, to correspond to the sun, it would begin at 2.24bya, missing the target by over one and a quarter billion years. If the sun is dated to the beginning of day 4, that would stretch the gap to 3.84 billion years. Elastic time is a useful concept.

And what is meant by life in water? It is generally accepted that all life was initially water based. The first direct evidence is indeed 3.5 billion years but there are claims of biogenic carbon from Greenland rocks 3.7bya and as the first life would be prokaryotic cells that would not fossilise, most scientists would push life back beyond 4bya. Life itself would certainly not be coterminous with fossil life.

And of course, the Bible itself actually talks of ‘great whales’ (in fact, the word used, tannin, is generally considered to have been a Canaanite sea-monster, but I’m unable to find the necessary data) and their evolution from land-based ungulates only began 50 mya. Should anyone insist on fish, then I’m afraid they will have to wait until the misleadingly named Cambrian Explosion beginning 540 mya. The authors singularly fail to mention that winged fowl were supposedly created at the same time, totally at variance with palaeontological evidence which dates the first birds, such as the famous archaeopteryx, to about 150 mya.

He seriously cites an alternative way of justifying the biblical account. The infamous omphalos theory of Henry Gosse, that when the world was created it was created with all the signs of age, complex stratigraphy, dinosaur fossils in sedimentary rock and starlight already on the way here. Of course, we would now have to add a deliberate manipulation of the mutation record in DNA, the pattern of magnetic stripes in seafloor spreading, ice cores, solar composition, dendrochronology and all the radioactive dating clocks preset at half past ten. Such a scenario cannot be proven to be false, but it seems odd, if not downright mendacious. At least, the authors helpfully illustrate the idea with photographs of jeans being ‘distressed’ to have holes in their knees.

The argument that God could not have left evidence of the six-day creation for fear of obliging us to accept that he exists and thus not allowing us to function as human beings with free will, is manifest nonsense, in that throughout history the best argument for the existence of God was the teleological argument, that from design, and a powerful one it was (it remains the most popular argument, hence the desperate creationist assault on the fact of evolution). It was good evidence for his existence and has only fallen into disrepute because of the discoveries of science. So, God had a world in which the evidence for a six-day creation was perfectly acceptable to most people and with no seeming malign effects on free will. Then he ruins it all by opting for deep time and evolution. Can’t help but think it a tactical mistake. Besides which, what is God doing putting all this evidence into his holy book and associated works to show us that he does, in fact, exist, if the whole point is to remain beyond the reach of human evidence?

The book then launches into even further complications linking the days of creation with world history. Superficially it can sound a good case, but it is a house made of string and brown paper. I leave it to the reader to approach this book with due scepticism. Above all, to ask themselves the simple question that needs to be answered. What on earth was all this done for? Either God wants us to know the truth behind the history of the world or he doesn’t. Why is it ‘revealed’ in such an extraordinarily complex, fanciful and manifestly suspect way, when presumably God could have given a perfectly coherent account from the beginning?

I rate it 2 out of 5. It lacks the rigour required for such a book, and, whether deliberately or not, certainly avoids dealing with the obvious difficulties. My initial thought was a one, as it did not achieve what it was trying to achieve, but it was reasonably well written and I quite liked the little vignettes, which was an idea that worked well.

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