The age of the earth controversy: Beginnings to Hutton

Summary

Speculation concerning the age of the earth begins with civilisation itself. The creation myths of ancient Egypt and other early cultures were soon expanded into elaborate cosmologies by Indian, Persian and Greek philosophers. Jewish and, more insistently, Christian scholars long believed that the Bible provided an exact chronology beginning with the Creation (and even foretelling the world's end). Such truncated apocalyptic chronologies were opposed first by Aristotelian advocates of an eternal earth and then by deistic freethinkers who regarded the earth's age as indefinite but immense. As textual scholarship cast doubt upon the literal reliability of Genesis, alternative chronologies arose which depended increasingly upon geological evidence. James Hutton's assertions about the earth's age reflect his awareness of this broader context and define his own important contribution to it.