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The Enlightenment and the History of Deep Time (NOTCOM / All Souls Joint Session)

The next NOTCOM / All Souls Joint Session (Intellectual History Seminar) will take place on 5 February 2026, from 2:00 to 4:00 pm, at All Souls College (Hovenden Room).

Ivano Dal Prete (Yale University) will present a paper entitled “The Enlightenment and the History of Deep Time. The Making of a Historiographical Myth.”

*Please note that the mode of attendance is in-person only.

All welcome.

 

Abstract:

The eighteenth-century discovery of deep time has been a crucial element of historical narratives about the making of the modern world. By revealing the vastness of the Earth’s geological past, the Enlightenment replaced the young creation of Genesis with a succession of worlds and with the mutability of the forms of life. Darwinism, modern geology and cosmology, the very secularization of western societies would all be unthinkable without the eighteenth-century reconceptualization of time.

That story aligns well with heroic tales of the triumph of scientific rationalism, yet recent scholarship has questioned its foundational assumptions. New evidence shows that in pre-1700 Europe, belief in a young Earth always coexisted with alternative viewpoints that placed its beginning into an indefinite but distant past. As long as a Creation was acknowledged, religious authorities normally did not these views as problematic. Indeed, they circulated freely even in publications aimed at vernacular audiences.

Rather than discovering deep time, the eighteenth century constructed the historiographical myth of its discovery. Influential philosophes like Voltaire, Boulanger or d’Holbach weaponized Earth history to challenge the historical accuracy of Scripture and with it, the political institutions that founded their legitimacy on the biblical Revelation. As they rearranged sources and evidence in a way that suited their political and cultural agendas and their conception of history, they articulated for the first time what remains to this day the mainstream narrative of the history of deep time. Theories based on an ancient Earth were framed not in their uninterrupted continuity with medieval and Renaissance traditions, but as recent feats of a human reason liberated from Christian obscurantism. Their reconstruction of the past erased the complexity and pluralism of medieval and Renaissance Earth history, erecting in its place a simplistic opposition between a premodern Europe that uniformly accepted the young Earth of Genesis, and an enlightened age in which human reason, finally unshackled from religious prejudices, could recognize the evidence of its vast antiquity.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
adminnotcom (January 6, 2026). The Enlightenment and the History of Deep Time (NOTCOM / All Souls Joint Session). NOTCOM. Retrieved March 15, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15h2n


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