The 100,000 Years Marker

The title of this post comes from an exchange I had with one Bill Gnade over at Debunking Christianity in the comments section of this post . I will write more on that later, but what I want to talk about now is the fact that modern humans, homo sapiens, have been around for about 100,000 years. This point was brought up by Christopher Hitchens in the debate I wrote about in the last post. He wondered why God waited 98,000 years of our existence before sending his Son and giving the human species the means of salvation. I had thought of this same objection to the notion of God's supposed revelation when dealing with the obstinate Mr. Gnade. If Christianity is true, would not God have been there from the beginning of human consciousness? Of course to a biblical creationist he was, with Adam and Eve in the garden and shortly after with their descendants. But to those who can not be so intellectually dishonest as those more literal interpreters, and yet still insist on calling themselves Christian, the problem is obvious. What took God so long? He had to wait those 90,000 plus years before telling us about himself. Yet if he created us with souls that can go to Hell for eternity, why didn't he speak up sooner? If humanity can't have any morality without God telling us about it (as Christians repeatedly claim) why leave those ancestors of ours without such guidance?

Christians like Gnade fancy themselves "sophisticated" (he used the word himself) for coming up with ideas and theories that attempt to reconcile scripture with reality. Instead they bring forth from the depths of their confused brains mere sophistry, pretty strings of words that on close inspection prove to be only worthless baubles. Isn't it funny how our world looks exactly as we would expect it to if the Christian God is a complete fiction?

Not only did this imagined god sit around heaven on his ass for tens of thousands of years of human life on this planet before deciding to make an appearance (talk about showing up late for an appointment)! but it took this omnipotent watchmaker billions of years to create his precious, big-brained, naked apes in the first place. How interesting that that is exactly how long we should expect a purely natural, unguided (by supernatural beings) process like evolution by natural selection to finally produce us.

Mark Twain, in Was the World Made for Man? stated it well : "Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; & anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would. I dunno."