"Best - just out of interest, have you ever read The Seashell on the Mountaintop by Alan Cutler? Very relevant to this discussion and would be interested to hear your opinion of the story."
Never heard of it, Islets. If I can find a free copy of it online somewhere I'll check it out and give you my thoughts.
Here's a description from Amazon:
"In the bestselling tradition of The Map that Changed the World and Longitude comes the tale of a seventeenth-century scientist-turned-priest who forever changed our understanding of the Earth and created a new field of science. It was an ancient puzzle that stymied history's greatest minds: How did the fossils of seashells find their way far inland, sometimes high up into the mountains? Fossils only made sense in a world old enough to form them, and in the seventeenth century, few people could imagine such a thing. Texts no less authoritative than the Old Testament laid out very clearly the timescale of Earth's past; in fact one Anglican archbishop went so far as to calculate the exact date of Creation...October 23, 4004, B.C. A revolution was in the making, however, and it was started by the brilliant and enigmatic Nicholas Steno, the man whom Stephen Jay Gould called "the founder of geology." Steno explored beyond the pages of the Bible, looking directly at the clues left in the layers of the Earth. With his groundbreaking answer to the fossil question, Steno would not only confound the religious and scientific thinking of his own time, he would set the stage for the modern science that came after him. He would open the door to the concept of "deep time," which imagined a world with a history of millions or billions of years. And at the very moment his expansive new ideas began to unravel the Bible's authoritative claim as to the age of the Earth, Steno would enter the priesthood and rise to become a bishop, ultimately becoming in 1988. Combining a thrilling scientific investigation with world-altering history and the portrait of an extraordinary genius, The Seashell on the Mountaintop gives us new insight into the very old planet on which we live, revealing how we learned to read the story told to us by the Earth itself, written in rock and stone."
What jumps out at me immediately is this:
"Fossils only made sense in a world old enough to form them, and in the seventeenth century, few people could imagine such a thing."
Of course we now know that fossils can form very quickly under the right conditions are completely consistent with a 6,000 year-old earth.
"revealing how we learned to read the story told to us by the Earth itself"
I would prefer to trust the story told by God Himself. It sounds interesting though. Of course sea shells on top of Mt Everest are better explained by my model of a global flood than by deep time. I can read up on Nicholas Steno and buy the book if I am so inclined. Thanks for the recommendation.
Also, I have to admit that I would have a slight bias against Steno if he was "venerated as a saint and beatified by the Catholic Church." The Catholic Church is not known for its adherence to the Word of God - hence the Protestant Reformation.