When I young sometime in the late 1980s I read an American fact book that was sent by my US family. It was a good book, filled with random facts about the world. How heavy is a neutron star? Who killed Julius Caesar? That kind of stuff. Anyway, in a random side box titled 'Did you know?' was a brief comment about Bishop Ussher calculated the date of creation to October, 4004BC.
I didn't think anyone took the calculation seriously, I thought it was a 'fun fact' about our forefather's doomed efforts for learning the age of the universe. It was an inset in a page about the real age of the universe.
I remained ignorant of the phenomenon of people taking it seriously until I was in my twenties (sometime around 2004, a number of months before I first visited this site (I lurked for a little while, before registering). I learned that some people thought thermodynamics was a nail in the coffin for evolution from a sort of precursor of wikipedia and began investigate the merits, or lack thereof, of this position.
abe: Actually I remember learning that 'some people believe animals were specially created and not evolved' sometime in high school, but I didn't think it was particularly common.
Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.
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