Abstract
During the past two centuries there has been a growing accumulation of evidence that the earth and the universe are very old. The Bible does not give us any explicit information about the age of the universe, but a casual or a highly literalistic reading of the Bible seems to indicate that the universe was created at a relatively recent time. The notion that the Earth and the universe are young was commonly held in the Westerns world where the influence of Christian thought was strong, although Christian theologians had suggested long before that the "days" of creation narrative of Genesis 1 need not be understood as days of 24 hours length, and that the age of the universe was not given by the Bible. Nevertheless, until about two centuries ago, most people in the Western world thought the Earth and the universe to be only several thousand years old. had of the creation.