The established church believed the Bible supported the notion of a central Earth. Reasoning from this faulty premise it concluded that, since the word of God cannot be fallible, Galileo must be mistaken. He was therefore condemned as a heretic in 1632 by the inquisition. Galileo, for his part, decided to recant after he was given the choice between that and the rack. Ignorance triumphed for a short time until the weight of evidence finally tipped the balance the other way. Galileo was ultimately shown to be right, and the church was shown to be wrong. Pope John Paul II finally reversed the judgement on Galileo in October 1992.

As it turned out, the Bible did not support the notion of the Earth as being at the physical centre of God’s creation. Nowhere does the Bible suggest that the Earth is the centre of our solar system: that idea was actually thought up by a young Greek scholar called Eudoxus in answer to a problem in astronomy set by Plato. But plainly, the church establishment of the day was guilty of misinterpreting the biblical data.

It was in the eighteenth century, during the age of the enlightenment, when the power of reason became widely recognised. Gradually, philosophers began to boldly question the authority of the established church. In his Essai sur l’histoire générale et sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (Essay on General History and on the Customs and the Character of Nations, 1756), for example, Voltaire, whilst making clear his personal belief in the existence of God, fiercely attacked the religious establishment of the day.

In the nineteenth century, the difficulty of reconciling religious faith with scientific insight became a major problem for the Christian church. The geologists challenged the then prevalent Christian teaching that the Earth had been created in 4004 BC - an unfortunate insertion into the margin of the King James Bible which is nowhere present in scripture. By 1820, geological evidence for an ancient Earth, millions of years old, had accrued. Although Owen Chadwick, in his book The Victorian Church, affirms that ‘no one who possessed faith lost it by learning geology3’ nevertheless, it is the early 1800’s which mark the beginning of a gradual shift away from the Anglican church by the educated classes.

It was archbishop James Ussher who was responsible for the arithmetic. He actually calculated that the Earth would have been created on ‘the night preceding 23rd October 4004 BC4’. In fact, the creation date cannot be accurately calculated from the information presented in Genesis, even if the creation days are to be taken as literal days. As Dr A.J. Monty White has pointed out, there are ‘fourteen possible generation gaps in the genealogies5’ .

In the literature of creation science, it is sometimes suggested that the geologists are somehow in league with the evolutionists. However, whilst it is true that evolution theory requires vast amounts of time, the science of geology has never been dependent upon the theory of evolution. We should additionally note that the geologists had proposed an ancient age for the Earth well before the publication of the evolution theory; and the very geologists who advanced the ancient creation proposal were themselves Christians. Indeed, according to Owen Chadwick, ‘the most eminent English geologists were not only Christian but clergymen6’.