Birth And Death Date Confusion

[Tarser]

There's something that is baffling me about birth and death dates. I am most likely being very stupid, but here's what I'm not understanding:

Someone born in 1960 and lives for thirty years has the dates 1960 - 1990

No problem with that!

But in reading about philosophers, it seems to me that they are dying before they are born! E.g,

Socrates 470 - 399 BCE
Plato 427 - 349
Aristotle 384 - 322

What is happening here? Why is 399 BCE later than 470 BCE etc?

[fiction-factory]

Hi Hypgnosis- I'm not sure what you mean by " the notorious 6000 years of earth's existence"

[Hypognosis]

@fiction-factory

Is it 4000? I can't remember. Whatever young-earth creationists claim it is.


Ah. I've just scrolled sideways, to look at the side column (I'm viewing on a phone) and realised this is not in the section I thought it was in.

I must admit I wondered what BCE was, the first time I came across it. Expected something technical (it was a science forum, discussing evolution, geological evidence and so on). Why add a redundant extra letter to a perfectly well understood acronym? Political correctness? No-one had heard of it back then.

I'm not surprised it was the J-witnesses who dreamt it up. Creationists regularly butted in to disrupt the, otherwise entertaining, scientific debates and it's easy to just lump them all together.

[fiction-factory]

The only 4000 I know is over 4000million. if there are some claiming it's only 4000 years it'd be interesting to see how they explain things like dinosaur fossils and carbon dating info on rocks etc

[Ellipsis]

It's stardate 69080.6, captain.

[Jackdaw33]

In the 17C the Irish archbishop, Ussher, calculated that according to biblical evidence the world was created in 4004 B.C. so it would be 6019 years old by now.

[jno]

sunset on October 22, according to Ussher. Sunset where, I don't know. It was part of a complete chronology of the world he drew up which was actually pretty accurate till he got back before the Assyrians or thereabouts.