Page "The Bible and history" Paragraph 35

Galileo is the name most closely associated with the first scientific assault on biblical authority, but the heliocentric universe was sufficiently peripheral to biblical ontology to be eventually accommodated.

Galileo's writings were on the Catholic Index of prohibited books All traces of official opposition to heliocentrism by the church disappeared in 1835 when these works were finally dropped from the Index.

Nevertheless heliocentricism has been accepted by most ( but not all ) of today's fundamentalists.

It was in fact the birth of geology, marked by the publication of James Hutton's Theory of the Earth in 1788, which set in train the intellectual revolution that would dethrone Genesis as the ultimate authority on primeval earth and prehistory.

The first casualty was the Creation story itself, and by the early 19th century " no responsible scientist contended for the literal credibility of the Mosaic account of creation.

" ( p. 224 ) The battle between uniformitarianism and catastrophism kept the Flood alive in the emerging discipline, until Adam Sedgwick, the president of the Geological Society, publicly recanted his previous support in his 1831 presidential address: We ought indeed to have paused before we first adopted the diluvian theory, and referred all our old superficial gravel to the action of the Mosaic Flood.

For of man, and the works of his hands, we have not yet found a single trace among the remnants of the former world entombed in those deposits.