The Friends of Charles Darwin

…The antebellum era saw a series of scientific discoveries that appeared to undermine revealed religion. In a decade or two geologists upped the age of the Earth from the 6,000 years of the Biblical account to millions or even hundreds of millions of years. This tension between religion and science generated a huge interest in the mid-19th century in geology and paleontology. (Under this impetus, Hudson River school landscape painting became much more geologically precise.) These discoveries were ‘reconciled’ with revealed religion by ingenious scientific theories like the Catastrophism of Louis Agassiz, the best-known American natural scientist of the antebellum era.