The Structure of Infinity

The Fossil Record (Excerpt)

By RichardThompson - Sadaputa das

In the early nineteenth century, the developing science of geology began to reveal a very strange picture of the history of life on the earth. In its current form, the story begins with the formation of the earth about 4.5 billion years ago. After less than a billion years, life appeared in the form of bacteria and algae. This state of affairs persisted until about 500 to 600 million years ago, with the appearance of peculiar marine life forms, such as the Ediacara fauna and the creatures of the Burgess Shale. A wide variety of more familiar marine creatures appeared in the subsequent Cambrian period, and life began to seriously invade the land in the Devonian, about 400 million years ago. There followed the age of Carboniferous coal swamps, the age of early reptiles, and then some 150 million years of dinosaurs. After the dinosaurs mysteriously died out, the age of mammals prevailed for some 65 million years up to the present. Humans of modern form appeared at the very end of this period, no more than about 100,000 years ago.

This story does not explicitly appear in the sacred books of any religion, as far as I am aware. Some Christian creationists deny it altogether and advocate a young earth, based on Mosaic chronology, which dates the creation of the earth to about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Other creationists prefer to reconcile the Bible with geology by interpreting the days of creation in Genesis as long ages. And some propose the existence of races of humans or semi-humans that preceded the recent appearance of Adam and Eve.

In Hinduism, the immensity of geo-logical time does not pose a problem. Hindu chronology, as defined in the Puranas, is based on several major time intervals similar to those of the geologists. These are the divya yuga of 4,320,000 years, the manvantara of about 307 million years, and the kalpa of 4,320,000,000 years. Astronomer Carl Sagan remarked, "The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths … in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology."

But whether this similarity is accidental or not, the Hindu account of what happened in the past is quite different from the geological story. It refers almost exclusively to the activities of superhuman beings who themselves live for millions or hundreds of millions of years. The Puranic stories hardly seem to refer to the earth as we know it at all, and it may well be that they were intended to refer to a higher, celestial realm.