Romans 1:22
"Belief in ‘deep time’ actually developed in France in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, before spreading to Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Amongst the most notable French voices against scriptural authority and belief in the Flood in the 18th
century were: Bernard de Fontenelle (1657–1757), Benoît de Maillet
(1656–1738), Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778), and Denis
Diderot (1713–1784).
Bernard de Fontenelle
Fontenelle was trained at the Jesuit Collège de Bourbon, and for
decades (1697–1740) he held the prestigious position of Secretary to the
Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. This allowed him to influence the
development and direction of geological science in France in a way that
undermined belief in the Biblical Flood.
He had earlier written a book (1686) entitled Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds.
Effectively a science fiction dialogue, it discussed space travel and
the possibility of life on the moon and other planets. Fontenelle
envisioned gradual alterations in nature occurring over hundreds of
thousands of years, and his book was influential in preparing the French
imagination for a different worldview over the subsequent century.Benoît de Maillet
Another significant influence of the middle of the 18th century was de Maillet’s edited book Telliamed (a reversal of his name).
It was first published posthumously (1748) by the Jesuit priest Abbé
Jean Baptiste le Mascrier, although draft copies had been circulating in
Paris for a couple of decades. De Maillet had become a French diplomat,
allowing him to travel to the Middle East where he became acquainted
with other cultures and beliefs.
Telliamed argued the case for millions of years of change
from the perspective of a Hindu sage against a French missionary.
Earlier clandestine drafts had argued that the earth was at least two
billion years old, correlating roughly with half a day of the Hindu
creator god Brahma; the 12-hour day of Brahma is said to last for 4.32
billion years (during which period Brahma is awake), followed by a night
of similar length.
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
The famous Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire also claimed that deep
time was required for geological change. He commented in an anonymous
letter to the Academy of Bologna in 1746 that:
Revolutions of thousands of millions of years are infinitely less in the light of the Great Architect of Nature, than to us that of a wheel which compleats [sic] its round in the twinkling of an eye.
Voltaire
also argued that fossil fish found on Alpine mountains were in fact
food dropped by Christian pilgrims! However, Charles Lyell, though a
strong opponent of the Mosaic account, thought Voltaire was arguing
deceitfully, because Voltaire recognized that such fossil evidence
strongly supported the Biblical Flood account. He commented quite
bluntly that:
The numerous essays written by him on geological subjects were all calculated to strengthen prejudices, partly because he was ignorant of the real state of the science, and partly from his bad faith.
Voltaire
even began to argue that the Hindu writings were more ancient and
authentic than the Bible. However, again he misrepresented the truth. He
praised the Ezour Veda (or Ezourvedam) as a valuable
gift to Western nations, saying they were indebted to this eastern
religion. But in reality, this was a latter-day forgery; the work of
Jesuits, not an ancient text. It was in the form of a dialogue between
two supposed Vedic sages, one a monotheist and the other a polytheist
who conclude that Hindu polytheism is more or less monotheism in
disguise.
Denis Diderot
Diderot was an agitator against the political and religious authorities and, at one time, was imprisoned for sedition. In his Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature (1754), he wrote:
… may not a philosopher, left to his own conjectures, suspect that, from time immemorial, animal life had its own constituent elements, scattered and intermingled with the general body of matter, and that it happened that these constituent elements came together … [and] that millions of years passed between each of these developments … ?
The
Jesuit-trained Diderot was well acquainted with Voltaire and gradually
lost his faith, becoming a deist, then an atheist. He was tasked with
editing a French Encyclopédie, a comprehensive work published
from 1751 to 1772 to explain the world from the perspective of
naturalism, and aimed at changing the thinking of French society.
Belief in millions of years of geological change then spread to Britain in the late 18th century and early 19th century through men such as James Hutton, Erasmus Darwin, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin." CMI
