Kant on the age of the world.

Abstract

In his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), Kant claims that the Universe has existed for 'a series of millions of years and centuries'. In light of the authority of biblical chronology, according to which God created the world some 6000 years ago, this claim is remarkable. In this paper, I argue that the novelty of Kant's account of the age of the world does not only lie in the sheer size of the number he gives, but also in the fact that it was motivated by cosmological considerations (as opposed to the proto-geological considerations that motivated other contemporary theories that challenged the biblical dogma). Since Kant does not explain how he comes to claim such a high number for the age of the world, I give two possible reasons that can be reconstructed from his 1755 works, both of which rely on his conception of the vast spatial dimension of the visible Universe. The first reason combines this conception with Kant's cosmogony, the second states that the vast spatial extension of the Universe implies an extremely long duration of its existence due to the finitude of the speed of light.