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" Cope laughed. “I wouldn’t worry yourself, my friend. Eobasileus has been extinct for thirty-seven million years.”
At this, the preacher could no longer contain himself. “Nonsense! Utter nonsense!”
“Nonsense?” asked Cope.
“The archbishop James Ussher, using the Holy Bible itself, worked back generation by generation, mathematically, and calculated that the Earth was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC at precisely eight a.m.”
“Did he, now? Eight a.m., precisely?”
“Precisely,” the preacher insisted.
Copy and Sternberg exchanged amused looks.
“Well,” Cope replied, “since the rotation of the Earth assures us that it’s always eight a.m. somewhere in the world, I suppose I should applaud him for guessing the correct time, at least.”
The cowboy couldn’t help but interject.
“Pardon me, Preacher, but if I recall correctly, didn’t the Bible say something about the Lord resting on the seventh day?”
The preacher looked confused. “What?”
“I’m certain of it.” The cowboy quickly snatched the Bible from the preacher’s hands and opened it to the first page of Genesis. “Sure. Here it is. He got started on a Monday, making light and darkness. By the time he got around to creating the Earth it was well into the third day. I make that to be Wednesday, not Sunday.”
Nonplussed and blushing, the preacher snatched his Bible back.
The cowboy shrugged. “Looks to me like your archbishop pulled a fast one, Preacher. Or maybe he just wasn’t all that good at calculating. "
― Wynne McLaughlin , The Bone Feud
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" All the dilemmas and questions of today were known in ethics more than 2,000 years ago. All the greatest teachers of mankind whether prophets such as Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad or non-prophets such as Confucius , Gautama, Buddha, Socrates, Kant, Tolstoy , and Martin Buber, covering a period from the sixth century BC up to the present ( Martin Buber died in 1965) have taught essentially the same morals. As distinguished from rules about social orders and ways of production , moral truths are constant. The reason for this lies in the fact that the riddle had been established at the moment of creation in the " prologue in heaven" in the act preceding the whole of human history. Intelligence, education, and experience do not in themselves help us approach or better understand all of that. Jesus pronounced his truth when he was a child and was slightly more than thirty when he was condemned. He needed neither knowledge nor experience for his great, capital truths about God and man because these truths could not be reached by knowledge or experience. Are they not " Hidden from the wise and the learned and revealed to the little ? "