Time
Calculating the age of the Earth, and so pinpointing the moment of Creation, has been a theological and scientific preoccupation for centuries. A memorable attempt to provide a beginning for everything was made in the mid-17th century by James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh, who claimed that Creation fell precisely on Sunday 23 October, 4004 BC.
What was eventually revealed was a far larger expanse of geological time than the Bible would account for. Evidence of this deep time is locked into the rocks of the Earth itself. By the early 20th century, radioactive dating techniques refined estimates of the age of the Earth, currently calculated at about 4.54 billion years.