“It cannot be denied, in spite of frequent interpretations of
Genesis 1 that departed from the rigidly literal, that the almost universal view of the Christian
world
until the eighteenth century was that the Earth was only a few thousand years old. Not until the development of modern scientific investigation of the Earth itself would
this view be called into question within the church.”
Christianity and the
Age of the Earth, Davis A. Young, 1982, p 25