Modern science doesn’t have a long history. As of roughly 200 years ago science was not the highly funded complex that exists today. It was largely a passion of independent scholars working on areas of their personal interests. Things like mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, physics, astronomy, etc. There were monks, business people, physicians, all sorts of professions.

Religious people began to loose interest in eternal questions and began to focus on the here and now. They began to see the world around them as “nature” and not as “creation”. Intellectuals transformed their Creator into some sort of theoretical “deity” rather than the “Engineer of the Universe” and all its contents.

So, they needed to come up with some sort of “natural” creation story to replace to Biblical one. Atheists were considered crackpots in those days. A breakthrough came with a theory published by a fellow names Charles Lyell. He came up with the concept of “uniformitarianism” which was to replace the great flood as responsible for the earth’s geological record. That is, that the layers and layers of sediments found beneath us was a record of nearly an million years of earth’s history and requires no great flood to interpret it. His idea was that ,”The present is the key to the past.”

Another guy by the name of Charles Darwin learned about this novel concept and he wanted to see if this proposal would help the notion that nature could be its own inventor. He had no understanding of how inheritance works. Genetics was unknown at this point. But, he was breeding pigeons and was aware that various physical characteristics could be altered with selective breeding practices. He wondered if nature could do similar things. With an expanded natural timeline from Lyell this could give natural “breeding” time to create “new species”.

While traveling to various places on the a ship he saw some existing creatures with what seemed like natural adaptations to improve their fit in their environment. He supposed that this could have come about by “natural selection” of more fit individuals. With a few of his interpreted examples under his belt, he took the leap of faith and applied it to the whole.

This became the beginning of the end for the Biblical understanding of natural history and the origins of life on earth. His ideas were dashed to pieces by the real understanding of how inheritance works starting with the work of Gregor Mendel. Traits were discovered to be of discrete factors that don’t actually combine traits to create something new in between. Very rarely does something in between emerge, but rather one or the other unless multiple factors are involved. Factors that should not change by random events simultaneously.

But this new culture, “science”, was on a roll by now and the “conquest” of God and the Bible was under way. This was fueled by a promoter, Thomas Huxley. He saw the opportunity to advance himself and overthrow the British intellectual community by removing the Bible from the study of nature entirely. (And as a result place himself as the new leader of “science” and its push towards atheism and the creation of a new religion where nature itself is only God.)

It soon became a great self-perpetuating comedy of errors.