new church life: september/october 2017
fourth is in Last Judgment (Posthumous), no. 90.
Conjugial Love 29 reads: “Who, using his reason, cannot conclude
accordingly that people who have lived from the beginning of creation – a
period reckoned at 6000 years?” (4004 BC + say 1760 AD = 5764, close
enough.) To me this indicates that Swedenborg was not really interested in
disputing the length of time that creation had been in being.
Earlier, when he wrote his Principia, he was deeply into the problem of just
how the material for the universe was created, but apparently not concerned
about the timing involved. Students of his scientific works are welcome to
correct me about that, but once he had completed that work on the Principia
and the following two volumes that completed the work he had started out
to do, his next major project was about the anatomy of the human body. And
after that, in 1744, he stopped all of his scientific work and devoted himself to
the Lord’s work.
From this point on he would have been extremely busy, and would
probably have considered that time spent on speculation about the age of the
earth or animals of older times and changes in them, to be a waste of time.
Also, and significant, although many people were aware of the presence of
seashells imbedded in rock, no large and identifiable bones had come into
public knowledge as yet. Swedenborg was aware of the seashells also and in
1719 when he was exploring around Mt. Kattekille he noticed such rocks and
wrote a short booklet about them for the Queen and presented it to her on her
birthday (which was the same day as his). But he, like all others that noticed
these, attributed the cause to the flood noted in Genesis.
It was some 30 years after Swedenborg’s death that interest in ancient and
extinct animals became widespread. And as well there doesn’t seem to be any
indication in the theological works that any interest in the subject arose.
Some fossils were found in quarries in Europe, from time to time, but
the quarry men didn’t care much about them, and they were generally seen
as victims of the flood. The closest major change in scientific thinking was an
interest in the age of the earth.
Comte Buffon, a renowned French naturalist, experimented with heated
balls of earth and stones to measure the time required to cool them off, and
from this tried to calculate the age of the earth, assuming it had been part of
the sun and had broken off. But he didn’t publish his work until 1779. His
estimate was 75,000 years rather than Ussher’s 6,000. So really there was no
knowledge of prehistory at all; history started with Genesis as far as the science
of that day was concerned.
God Creates Humans
Just how The Lord created humans I don’t know, but I’m sure that at some
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