ABSTRACT
Essential to the Christian vision is the notion that the world has a history. At a very early stage, scholars attempted to make the clues in the Bible about the origin of the world more explicit, and to supplement them from other sources. The secular sciences were developed and deployed for the purpose. When from the seventeenth century onwards a new image of the earth arose, there was an opportunity to fit hell into it. Geology focuses purely on processes that are played out in and on the earth. The mineralogists were developing an eye for the way in which the earth was formed, and in the period around 1800, mineralogy gave birth to geology. The geologists had now provided a better insight into the age of the earth, but the age and origin of the universe remained shrouded in mystery.
