Archbishop James Ussher, the man who calculated the Biblical age of the earth. We often hear religious Christians claim that the world is 6,000 years old (or 6,024 years old, plus six or seven weeks, to be exact).  I won’t weigh in on the veracity of that claim, but it does raise an interesting question: where do they get that number?  The Bible provides exactly zero dates, so how can anyone claim to figure it out? The first man who claims to have figured it out was James Ussher, the Protestant Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland in the middle of the 17th century.  A scholar and influential churchman, Ussher studied the Bible and concluded that the famous creation of the world, in the Book of Genesis, must have taken place on October 22, 4004 BC, at around 6:00 PM, local time, according to the Julian calendar. It seems arbitrary, doesn’t it?  But Ussher didn’t just throw a dart at a calendar.  It was based on a literal reading of the ...