Before Darwin, the orthodox Christian view was that the world was created by God and altered once at the time of the flood. No animals had appeared, changed (known as special creation) or become extinct (known as plenitude) since Adam named them.

It took a long time to accept that the fossils that were being dug up were the remains of organic creatures. The reasons for fossils being found were given sometimes as The Devil or God making patterns in the rock.

In the 17^th century Naturalist John Ray said that fossils showed that species of shellfish had become extinct. The Christian answer to extinctions for a long time (even after the discovery of fossil dinosaurs) was that the creatures lived in an unexplored part of the Earth. This was because they could not accept the fact that God would create something imperfect which would need extinction. God, it was believed, would only create perfect forms.

When the exploration of the Earth had shown that not all the fossilised creatures could still be alive, Christians then took the view that God had destroyed the Earth and recreated everything in it again. The scientists showed that this had happened a number of times.

The Christian response was progressionism, that God had done this destruction/recreation an number of time, Noahs flood being the last, with each new creation not linked to the previous one, as per 19^th Century paleontologist Louis Aggasiz.

In the 18^th Century, Scientists, especially James Hutton showed that the Earth was subject to normal change by natural processes, this was known as uniformitarianism.

Adam Sedgwick explained that the fossil record showed "a gradual ascent to a higher type of being" and could point to a Micocene badger that was indistinguishable from modern badgers, showing that each ‘catastrophe’ was connected.

So this shows that Christians have continually changed their views in response to the scientific position. This is known as the 'God of the gaps' argument. Once God would have been used to explain eveything. Now science has explained many phenomena, and God is used only to explain the parts that science hs no answer for yet.