Michael B. Roberts
Genesis Chapter 1 and geological time from Hugo Grotius and Marin Mersenne to William Conybeare and Thomas Chalmers (1620-1825) (in Myth and geology)
Geological Society Special Publications (2007), 273 39-49

Abstract:
In 1550 few questioned the "biblical" age of the earth, but by the mid-nineteenth century no educated person accepted it. The change is considered to have been a period of conflict between Christianity and science over the age of the earth. In fact, the conflict was small because from the Reformation era most considered the bible to be accommodated to its culture and that at the beginning of time God created a Chaos, which was re-constituted in "six days". This was put forward by Grotius and Mersenne, then by the Theories of-the Earth of Burnet, Whiston and others and then by later writers to allow for geological time. This reached its climax in early nineteenth century Britain with Chalmers, Conybeare and Buckland, thus preventing any major conflict between geology and Genesis. The perceived conflict of these centuries is a matter of retrospective interpretation, which does not do justice to those Christian thinkers, like de Luc, Chalmers and Townsend who accommodated geological time with little conflict, and those like Patrick, Ray and Whiston who opened up the way for this accommodation to geological time in the seventeenth century. The conflict between geology and Genesis is one of retrospective perception rather than historical reality. Only a minority of Christians, as with the anti- or scriptural geologists of the early nineteenth century, considered there to be a conflict.