Course 6: The Clock
Diploma Program · Course 6 · 3 Credits
Science disproved the Bible. The sentence has been in circulation, in some form, for about two hundred years. It got louder after Darwin. It got louder still after the popularization of cosmology in the twentieth century. By the 1990s it had hardened into a kind of slogan that people use to end conversations. Most Christians, when they first encounter it, do not have a good answer. Most skeptics, when they say it, do not realize they are saying two different things at once.
This course teaches you how to take the slogan apart. The first claim, about what science has found, is largely correct and the course concedes it without anxiety. The second claim, about what the Bible says, is wrong, and not in a contested way. The Bible does not say the universe is six thousand years old. It never says that. The figure comes from an arithmetic that Archbishop James Ussher performed on the genealogies in the 1650s, an arithmetic that does not survive a careful reading of Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. The whole modern fight between young-earth Christians and skeptical materialists turns on a claim that the text never actually made.
How this course is structured. Course 6 is built around one textbook and three assignments. You read The Clock first. Then you complete Assignment 1, which asks you to perform the dissolution move the book has been teaching you on a popular claim about Scripture and the age of things. Assignment 2 asks you to explain what you have been studying to a friend, in the voice a real conversation would take. Assignment 3 asks you to take the same dissolution move outside of Christianity entirely, find a manufactured dispute in the wild whose two sides are arguing about a claim neither party actually makes, and walk through it with the diagnostic questions the sheet provides. Three credits. Three assignments. One sustained way of learning to dissolve a fight that was never really there.
The Textbook
The Clock
Five chapters, one sustained move: the public-square fight about the age of the universe is a fight about a claim the Bible never actually makes. The book begins with the slogan, walks through Ussher's arithmetic and how it became the popular reading, returns to Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 to show the textual room the gloss had been closing, and lays out the four camps the modern conversation has hardened into.
The Three Assignments
Each assignment is a complete work package: the reading that precedes it, the structure of the work, and the specification for the paper and videos you produce. The three assignments build on each other. Assignment 1 gives you the move on the page. Assignment 2 gives you the move in conversation. Assignment 3 gives you the move outside of the domain the book worked in.
The Fight That Was Not There
Read the textbook. Choose one of three worked scenarios about Scripture and the age of things, and perform the dissolution move that takes a popular fight apart by showing the claim its two sides are arguing about was never actually made. Produce a paper of roughly 1,000 to 1,200 words and a recorded video of ten minutes. Respond to three challenge questions in a second video.
Telling Your Friend Why the Fight Is Not There
The register changes. You are no longer writing to demonstrate a move to an instructor. You are writing as someone who has learned something and is telling another person what you have learned — a real friend, not a catechumen and not a skeptic. Roughly 1,000 to 1,200 words, a ten-minute video, and a challenge response.
The Transfer: Finding a Manufactured Dispute in the Wild
The final assignment. Take the dissolution move the book uses across all five of its chapters and apply it somewhere the author did not. Somewhere outside of Christianity entirely. Find a public dispute in the wild whose two sides have been arguing for years about a claim neither party actually makes, walk it through the diagnostic questions, and produce the paper, the video, and the response.