ABSTRACT
Late in the seventeenth century, a young English divine named William Whiston (1667-1752) criticized his contemporaries for habitually “stretching [the Six Days Work] beyond the Earth, either to the whole System of things, as the most do, or indeed to the Solar System, with which others are more modestly contented in the case.” At the time, it was customary in Western science to accept the Mosaic story of Creation found in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis as a literal cosmogony, or account of how the universe began. For most, this meant that the entire cosmos, or at least the solar system, had been created by God’s fiat in six successive twenty-four-hour periods, approximately four thousand years before the birth of Christ. As long as Western natural philosophers were willing to tolerate supernatural explanations within the domain of science, there was little motivation to discard this traditional cosmogony. The desire for a natural history of Creation became acute only after those pursuing science in Europe began to view their task as explaining the workings of nature without recourse to direct supernatural activity.
