Luther did not agree with Augustine that God created everything suddenly. He was challenging the
Greek view at the time that the universe was eternal. For Luther, only God is eternal. Luther like others did believe the world was about 6000 years old.
Calvin wrote that Moses was not doing science or trying to give a scientific description of the cosmos. What one does find is both Luther and Calvin believed was the Bible taught that the sun and the stars went around the earth. When Copernicus put his idea forth that the earth went around the sun, Luther called him a heretic and Calvin said he was mad and possessed by the Devil. Like other Christians before them, they struggled with how to deal with new discoveries of science in how it related to their understanding of the Bible.
Charles Darwin published his Origen of Species in 1859. Through the theory of evolution, science, and the fossil record, he concluded that the fossil record revealed an old earth rather than a young earth. Many clergy of the time that believed in the inerrancy of the Bible also believed in an old earth. They did not see a contradiction between scripture and science, clergy like Henry Newman, Charles Kingsley and the famous conservative fundamentalist B. B. Warfield
William Paley was the forerunner to the intelligent design movement. Some of the scientists of this group viewed god more deistically as winding up the universe clock and letting it go on its own afterwards. The Scopes monkey trial pitted evolution and creation against each other in a political way. What people fail to understand about William Jennings Bryan was his issue was not as much the actual theory of evolution as it was the dangers of science without a moral code. Social Darwinism is the real enemy of religious faith, not the science of evolution.
Historically, its been mainly the Seventh Day Adventists who have claimed the world is only 6000 years old. The conflict between science and religion before this has not been over a hyper-literal reading of the Genesis story. It has only been recently since Henry Morris published his Genesis Flood and later Ken Ham promoting young earth creationism that these ideas have come to the forefront.
The religious front is now split over these issues but in the scientific community, there is no debate over whether the earth or universe is young or not. Why? Because there is no scientific evidence to support YEC. This is not an issue of rebellion against God as YEC suggests but rather a lack of factual evidence.
(A Review of chapter 4 of Joel Edmund Anderson "The Heresy of Ham")
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