Happy Birthday Universe!

James Ussher (1581-1656), was Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin, was highly regarded in his day as a churchman and as a scholar. He is best known today for Annales Veteris Testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti ("Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world"), which appeared in 1650, and its continuation, Annalium pars postierior, published in 1654. These are the basis of the Annals of the World and the "Ussher chronology".  This chronology  was quite respected in its day and was incorporated into the authorized version of the King James Bible printed in 1701.       In this work he established the first day of creation as Sunday 23 October 4004 BC, which would make the universe 6015 years old today.

According to some, (reason #17 listed here) the amount of dust on the lunar surface backs up an age of 6,000-8,000 years old for the moon, which would jive with Ussher's calculations.   (Just for fun, here is the page listing reasons #32-58 for a young earth)

In what might be called a "wise move" by Wikipedia editors, their article on lunar soil makes no mention of the rate of accumulation.   I say thats a good thing for Wikipedia because according to others nobody really knows the rate of accumulation of lunar dust and all our efforts to clarify the problem have only exaserbated it.

Not everybody agrees with Ussher (not even all his contemporaries) and thankfully, this is an opinion opinion opinion opinion opinion blog (mostly politics and the 2nd Amendment), so if pretending that the universe is billions and billions of years old helps you sleep at night, so be it.    I have several learned friends of that opinion.    But you'll notice that there is no "young earth creation" label on this post because thats not what this blog is about.   Plenty of argument on both sides on the internet already.

This is just an interesting piece of historical information.