“Excuse me, but could you create the Earth a bit more quietly?”

When you read this, it may be helpful to know that Biblical literalists believe the world to be about 6000 years old. This is deduced from reading the Bible and adding up the begats—that is, read the tedious geneaologies, figure out how old people were by the time they begat whomever they begat, and add all the ages up. Exact results vary a little (I think because different geneaologies in the Bible aren’t quite consistent). The most famous estimate is one produced by a 17th-century archbishop named James Ussher, who announced that the universe was created at nightfall preceding Sunday October 23, 4004 BC.

This sounds rather improbable to most of us, but as The Onion brilliantly points out, it must have been particularly surprising to some:

Members of the earth's earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.

According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization.

[read on]

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On a side note, I have a book that quotes a Sumerian poem, apparently about a thousand years older than the universe (the poem, not the book, which was printed in 2005), praising the bliss of drinking beer. In fact, beer was possibly invented by 9000 BCE and certainly by 7000 BCE; if the universe is indeed about 6000 years old, then God must have invented beer at least 3000 years before he bothered creating anything.

If I had invented beer, I’d be in rather more of a hurry to create water, yeast, hops, and barley.