The Age of The Earth - The Modern Era

Empiricism

Eventually came the enlightenment period of 17th century Europe and with it the basis of Empirical and scientific thought. The main basis of empiricism was that it relied upon basic observation to form an idea, or hypothesis. Previously the academic scheme had been dominated by biblical scholars working upon the pretext of a non-physical or spiritual understanding. The rise toward empirical thought encouraged scholars to look for the basic rationale behind a given event, object, or state. This empirical viewpoint led many scholars to believe in the idea of a clockwork, or mechanistic universe which, though limited, lit the way for many scholars such as Galileo, Copernicus, and others. Of the many questions contemplated by scholars during this era was the age of the earth.

One of the many scholars to use early empirical thought in answer to the age of the Earth question was James Ussher. Ussher was an English biblical scholar of the 1700's who wrote Annals of the World (2 vol., 1650-54; trans. 1658). Within his work he reasoned a fixed chronology and age of the earth (the fixed date being 4004BC). As with many of the scholars of his time the theory of the Earth's age related directly back to the story of Noah's Ark, and other biblical tales, all of which set the age of the earth to roughly several thousand years.

Catastrophism, Uniformitarianism

Charles Lyell

Two main theories predominated the early 18th century and directly contributed to evolutionary thought, they were Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism. Catastrophism was first proposed by Baron Georges Cuvier, in order to explain the age of the earth. Unlike Ussher, Cuvier's theory suggested that the age of the earth was 6,000 years old, and that geologically only catastrophic events had changed the geological structure of the earth. Cuvier's Catastrophism fit well into the biblical schemata of the time, and accounted for the discoveries of many "funny looking bones" found throughout Europe and other parts of the world (commonly known today as dinosaur bones and fossils). Using Cuvier's catastrophic model, the changes seen within fossilized bones were a result of a previous catastrophic change where an entire former and less perfect species was wiped out in order to give rise to a new species.

In contrast to Catastrophism, Uniformitarianism, promoted by Charles Lyell and James Hutton, stated that changes within the Earth are a direct cause of uniform events. For example, in Hutton and Lyell's schemata events such as erosion and earthquakes, which create changes within the present are the same processes which have existed within the past and occurred at the same gradual rate as they do within the present. Contrary to Catastrophism, the events that occurred due to geological change did not correspond directly to biblical events, rather they were a result of uniform events, which had existed since the earth's creation. The theories of geography that Hutton and Lyell proposed include the law of supposition, which states that objects found lower in the ground are older than those found in the upper parts, and the study of stratigraphy, which examines the layers or strata of the earth. Hutton and Lyell's theory was the first to assume upon non-biblical terms that the age of the earth was beyond 6,000 years. In addition, stratigraphy has continued to be a staple in geological and other prehistoric studies.