 Boyle had a straightforward notion of creation. First of all God, at a particular, fairly recent, point in absolute time, made matter. Boyle was an admirer of “our Irish St. Austin”(BC 1:40), James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, who famously propounded what seems to us, though not to his contemporaries, to be a very late date (4004 b.c.) for creation. Boyle saw “no just reason to embrace their opinion, that would so turn the two first chapters of Genesis, into an allegory, as to overthrow the literal and historical sense of them” and, noting the implausibility of the claims of “some extravagant ambitious People, such as those fabulous Chaldeans, whose fond account reach’d up to 40000 or 50000 years,” held that “Theology teaches us, that the World is very far from being so old by 30 or 40 thousand years as they … have presum’d: and does, from the Scripture, give us such an account of the age of the World, that it has set us certain Limits, within which so long a Duration may be bounded, without mistaking in our Reckoning. Whereas Philosophy leaves us to the vastness of Indeterminate Duration, without any certain Limits at all” (BW, 8:21; Birch 1772, IV:11). Revelation gives us (1) truths of which we would otherwise be ignorant, such as “the order and time of the Creation of the World and of the first man and woman”; (2) details of truths which we can otherwise obtain “but very dimly, incogently, and defectively”