From Education Portal:
Cuvier contributed a lot to our knowledge about the Earth. But the funny thing is, Cuvier also believed that Earth was only a few million years old! That's a big deal, considering we know now that the Earth is over four billion years old. How could a guy who knew so much about the Earth, who studied rocks and fossils and contributed so much to science, be so drastically wrong about the age of our planet?
As we'll see, it had a lot to do with Cuvier's upbringing and the scientific atmosphere that existed in his time. Let's look deeper into our geologic theories and see how they have changed over the last few hundred years.
George Cuvier lived in France right at the turn of the century, from 1769 to 1832. At that time in history, European scientists had a very strong habit of interweaving their studies of the Bible with their studies of natural science. When it came to Earth's history, they looked to the biblical story of the great flood to help them understand the geologic events of the past.
Combined with his impressions of the violent natural disasters recounted in the Bible, Cuvier's observations made him believe that most of Earth's history was characterized by geologic catastrophe.
So the story is that Cuvier’s bible fundamentalism got in the way of his usually high quality science. Except, according to Wikipedia,
The concept (catastrophism) was first popularized by the early 19th-century French scientist Georges Cuvier, who proposed that new life forms had moved in from other areas after local floods, and avoided religious or metaphysical speculation in his scientific writings…
The leading scientific proponent of catastrophism in the early nineteenth century was the French anatomist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier. His motivation was to explain the patterns of extinction and faunal succession that he and others were observing in the fossil record. While he did speculate that the catastrophe responsible for the most recent extinctions in Eurasia might have been the result of the inundation of low-lying areas by the sea, he did not make any reference to Noah's flood. Nor did he ever make any reference to divine creation as the mechanism by which repopulation occurred following the extinction event. In fact Cuvier, influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment and the intellectual climate of the French revolution, avoided religious or metaphysical speculation in his scientific writings.
Cuvier also believed that the earth was millions of years old, not six thousand, so why did his bible fundamentalism conflict so hard with a billion year earth, but he accepted a million year earth just fine?
What evidence is there that he was actually interweaving the biblical story with natural science? He didn’t say anything like that. He didn’t say anything that implied that. The fact that he disagreed is not justification for assigning him secret motives and dismissing him for religious bias. That is not how serious intellectual debate is done.
