I thought I’d mention Martin Rudwick’s new book, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution, a (very, very large) history of how scientists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries figured out that the earth was very, very old. Certainly much older than six thousand years. The problem of the age of the earth is a good one partly because because it’s so tangible, partly because it’s a good story (the French and English scientists are great, and Thomas Jefferson gets a look-in as well), and partly because it was solved more than two hundred years ago.
I was unfortunate enough to hear a program on my local NPR affiliate featuring some of these “ideas,” viz, there were dinosaurs on the ark (ickle baby ones, of course), the earth is 6000 years old, and the naturalistic evolution is only believed by a tiny minority of people, most of whom are university educators or similar indoctrinators.
PZ Myers said it best: we have failed a generation — or more — if the ideas of the Enlightenment are so poorly understood of distributed.