Creationist Lies
Out of context: Reply #516
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a'ight the Young Earth stuff was enough to get me back in the fray... (full disclosure: I did a bit o copy/paste to fill in some dates)
The Greek philosopher Xenophanes (570-470BC) noticed sea-shell fossils on mountains and concluded that they must have been formed by very slow processes, hence an old Earth. Herodotus (484-426BC) realized a century later that the northward bulge of Egypt into the Mediterranean can only be explained through the gradual deposition of mud which was carried there by the Nile river.
Meanwhile: Theophilus of Antioch (115-181AD) proposed the "begat" method to determine the age of the Earth from the Bible.
1000 yrs later English philosopher Roger Bacon (1214-1292AD) harshly criticized the Church for its doctrine of biblical interpretation over the scientific method, so they locked him up. 200 years later, Leonardo Da Vinci observed that fossils were preserved so that the communities remained intact, and he reasoned that a catastrophic flood would have disrupted any such patterns, so they must have been laid down very gradually, rather than in a single catastrophic event. While Da Vinci escaped imprisonment, the Chuch's only response was to refine its "begat" method a century later under James Ussher, to produce the current YEC date of 4004BC for the creation of the Earth.
THAT'S where this figure of a 6000 yr old earth comes from.
Da Vinci planted the seed of fresh ideas, and he was soon followed by other thinkers such as Nicolaus Steno (1638-1686, father of the geological Principle of Superposition and considered by some to be the father of geology itself), Robert Hooke (1635-1703, a legendary scientist who identified patterns of great time passage and species alteration in fossil records, although he didn't describe a mechanism for this change, unlike Darwin), and James Hutton (1726-1797), who presented very carefully reasoned arguments on the cyclical gradualist processes that drive the formation of geological structures within the Earth. His "Theory of the Earth" was published in 1788 and described many modern principles such as subterranean heat as a driving force for geological change, the differentiation between sedimentary and igneous rock, plate uplift as the cause for discontinuities, etc.
We're still a few hundred years from Darwin (who was a thesist, not a scientist). Evolution may have some holes in it, but we've known the Earth is older than the begats for , oh about two millenia.