Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

The philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) considered the example of time. How do I know that the world did not come into existence a very few moments ago, but complete with delusive traces of a much greater age? Those traces would include, of course, the modifications of the brain that give us what we take to be memories. They would also include all the other things that we interpret as signs of great age. In fact, Victorian thinkers struggling to reconcile the biblical account of the history of the world with the fossil record had already suggested much the same thing about geology. On this account, around 4,000 years ago God laid down all the misleading evidence that the earth is about 4,000 million years old (and, we can now add, misleading signs that the universe is about 13,000 million years old). This was never a popular move, probably because if you are sceptical about time, you quickly become sceptical about everything, or maybe because it presents God as something like a large-scale practical joker. Russell’s possibility sounds almost as far-fetched as Descartes’s Evil Demon.