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Post date: Nov 20, 2020 9:35:16 PM
Do you trust your primate Bishop Ussher, who has the earth only 6000ish years old??? I'll add another 4000 years, do you still trust his thinking???
If one had to emulate the foolishness of Archbishop Ussher and try to come up with the exact date on which the conceptual coin came down solidly on one side, it would be the moment when Pierre-Simon de Laplace was invited to meet Napoleon Bonaparte. Laplace (1749-1827) was the brilliant French scientist who took the work of Newton a stage further and showed by means of mathematical calculus how the operations of the solar system were those of bodies revolving systematically in a vacuum. When he later turned his attention to the stars and the nebulae, he postulated the idea of gravitational collapse and implosion, or what we now breezily term the "black hole." In a five-volume book entitled Celestial Mechanics he laid all this out, and like many men of his time was also intrigued by the orrery, a working model of the solar system as seen, for the first time, from the outside. These are now commonplace but were then revolutionary, and the emperor asked to meet Laplace in order to be given either a set of the books or (accounts differ) a version of the orrery.
At any event, and in his childish and demanding and imperious fashion, he wanted to know why the figure of god did not appear in Laplace's mind-expanding calculations. And there came the cool, lofty, and considered response. "Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothese." Laplace was to become a marquis and could perhaps more modestly have said, "It works well enough without that idea, Your Majesty." But he simply stated that he didn't need it.
https://lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/ussher.htm
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