Caroline Winterer

They're pretty deep down there.

I'm looking at the processes around me, and I'm having a hard time imagining that this could have happened in 6,000 years.

So probably it happened much longer.

Same thing happens with the fertility of the cotton plantations in the South.

They begin to sort of dig around, like which parts of the South are most fertile.

Ah, oh, here's a layer way down deep that we're digging.

Probably was not deposited in 6,000 years because as I'm looking at the weather and erosion around me, it's not happening very fast.

So they begin to hit upon this concept that today is called uniformitarianism, which is a fancy way of saying that the processes that we observe around us today are also occurring probably in the past.

And that's crucial for the idea of deep time, that things happened long ago.

the way they are happening now.

And it flies absolutely directly in the face of catastrophic myths like the Noah flood story, which, you know, a flood is a catastrophe, right?

And biblical history imagined many of these catastrophes happening to explain the modern world.

But by the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution and the

Expansion of slavery into the cotton South and, you know, a series of other economic and industrial transformations are bringing to Americans attention that it's possible, actually, that the Earth's history happened, not only in a very different way, but in a much, much longer way.

actually aren't really worried about the age of the Earth until the 17th century, when Europeans begin to be confronted with alternative chronologies from other places that they're visiting, like China.

And so that's why they actually become obsessed with this 6,000-year number, which didn't really exist before that time.

It's Europeans saying, well,

You know, we want the Bible to be not just the unique history of the Hebrew people.

We want the Bible to be the history of the whole world.

So we're going to run the numbers on the Bible, right?