In the late seventeenth century, Anglican Archbishop James Ussher developed a biblical chronology that established the date of the Earth's creation at 9 a.m., October 26, 4004 b.c. His calculations were taken seriously for 200 years and promoted debates on the Earth's origin.

One of the most prevalent schools of thought that followed was catastrophism, which held that the Earth was formed by supernatural forces according to the account found in the Bible in the book of Genesis. Scientists who adhered to this belief system were called Neptunists.

Evidence that Earth was much older began to accumulate, and in 1785, James Hutton in a presentation to the Royal Society of Edinburgh challenged catastrophism. Hutton proposed that Earth was in a continuous but gradual process of change, constantly decaying, renewing, and repairing itself. He added that Earth had no semblance of a beginning and no prospect of an end. His ideas led...