On Saturday, October 22, in the year 4004 bc at six o'clock in the evening God created heaven and earth, and in the days that followed, he created plants, animals, and human beings. This was the opinion of Archbishop Ussher, memorable seventeenth-century Irish church historian. The bishop based his calculations on biblical genealogies. Ussher was not the first or only theological calculator. Over time, more than 140 biblical scholars have attempted to reconstruct, on the basis of holy writ, the date on which God called the world into being. I have always found it a charming touch of these chronologians that they situated the origin of the world in the autumn. From the start, fruit must have been available to the first human pair, including, significantly, Eve's “apple.” Thus, their piety shaped their pondering.

A QUEST FOR MEANING

Is belief in the biblical creation story in agreement with science or, to be more specific, with the modern theory of evolution? When Darwin first published On the Origin of Species in 1859, it caused a storm of controversy in religious circles, especially in England, where the faithful widely held to Ussher's chronology. Is the idea of a chance-based origin of species through a process of change that spans hundreds of millions of years – ever since Darwin this has been the question – not in conflict with the creation account in Genesis?