9781422277607

governed by natural selection, with no divine guiding hand at the tiller. This was discomforting indeed to those who were brought up to believe very deeply that a benevolent God looks after us, and controls everything for the benefit of his special creature—man. Many scientists and thinkers of his time thought Darwin was wrong, just as some still do today. And many more hoped he was wrong, because he upset the beliefs that gave them comfort, in a world that could only too readily seem hostile to puny man. So the young Charles Darwin of the Galápagos Islands, and the bearded scientist he later became, had a lot to answer for. What sort of a man was he, and how did he come by his theory that so shook the scientific world? idea that the Earth was less than 6,000 years old. During the 1780s, the Scottish naturalist James Hutton proposed that many of Earth’s rock formations had been created through volcanic activity over millions of years, rather than being shaped by the Great Flood as Ussher and others had proposed. During the nineteenth century, Charles Lyell, a geologist who was also a close friend of Charles Darwin, would help Hutton’s ideas become accepted by the mainstream. The changing views about the age of the Earth were very important for the concept of evolution. The changes in species that Darwin theorized could only occur over a long timeline of thousands or millions of years. But while some Bible scholars agreed that the extensive genealogies listed in Genesis could not be used to determine the age of the Earth, they continued trying to date various Biblical events, linking them to archaeological discoveries in Egypt, Palestine, and Persia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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