who exactly first taught an old earth?

[rmwilliamsll]

an old earth, at least in the 100's of millions of years was determined 150 years before Darwin by Christians trying to find evidence for Noah's flood. But since when did inconvenient facts bother YECists?




Who were these Christians and how was their figure of 100's of millions of years arrived at?

moved from a sticky thread where discussion is discouraged.


There are several excellent books on the topic.
_Bursting the Limits of Time_ by Martin Rudwick
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/02...1903/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-1755257-7248160?ie=UTF8
is certainly one of the major works in the field.

the easiest thing to do is google the main actors:
blumenbach
montlosier
deluc
hutton
dolomieu
desmarest
la Metherie
saussure
dolomieu
curvier
lamarck
andre
brongniart
von buch
hall
buckland

the list of names drawn from the table of contents of _bursting the limits of time_

there was another book whose title floats around here, but i neglected to put it into my notes, so that book will have to be referenced again.

 

[shernren]

Whenever anybody asks "Why would Christians believe in an old earth?" or anything thematically similar, the first names that come to mind are Agassiz and Cuvier.

 

[KerrMetric]

I don't think the hundreds of millions figures really appeared until after Darwin as a serious argument. I know Rutherford in the first decade of the 1900's argued it was at least several hundred millions of years old.

The numbers prior to this were mainly in the tens of millions of years range with upper limits sometimes in the low hundreds. These were based upon cooling arguments for the Earth or the gravitational contraction of the Sun.

The current 4.5 billion year age was established in the 1950's.

 

[gluadys]

I don't think the hundreds of millions figures really appeared until after Darwin as a serious argument. I know Rutherford in the first decade of the 1900's argued it was at least several hundred millions of years old.

The numbers prior to this were mainly in the tens of millions of years range with upper limits sometimes in the low hundreds. These were based upon cooling arguments for the Earth or the gravitational contraction of the Sun.

The current 4.5 billion year age was established in the 1950's.

Wikipedia has an interesting entry on early estimates of the earth's age.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_old_is_the_Earth?#First_scientific_concepts


I think the idea that the earth's age was settled as hundreds of millions of years 150 years before Darwin is much too generous. Even in Darwin's life-time some were estimating an earth as young as 70,000 years.

But that the earth was definitely more than 10,000 years old was settled well before Darwin's birth. The fact that there was no global flood was settled by the 1840s at the latest. So it is definitely incorrect to say that an old age for the earth was assumed in order to accommodate evolution. The earth's antiquity was established first. Evolution came later.


Who was the first to say the earth was older than the biblical chronology seems to imply? Galileo might be a candidate. I don't know that he made an estimate, but his observations of geology led him to conclude that land and sea had changed places over long stretches of time.

Or we could go back to Aristotle who made similar observations and came to similar conclusions.