[Taraz]

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I don't mean to imply that. There has been much diversity on many issues throughout church history. I think the prevailing view of the Genesis days until the 19th century was that they were literal 24 hour periods. And there was no reason to think otherwise. I cite Augustine to show the difficulty of Genesis even without any scientific pressure. But other interpretations of Genesis began to be made before Darwin as Christians learned of the possible ancient age of the earth. I recently read a quote from Gould praising Bishop Ussher in which he said the bishop was a great scholar and his dating of the earth was perfectly reasonable for the time period and was almost uniformly accepted by Christians and non-Christians - there was no reason not to. It's interesting to note that he was able to accurately date many events in the ancient world through his study of the Bible and other ancient documents.

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I don't think that people realize that the strict literal interpretation of the Bible is a fairly recent phenomenon. It wasn't really as much of an issue back in the day.