Progressive creationism is the religious belief that God created new forms of life gradually over a period of hundreds of millions of years.
In this view creation occurred in rapid bursts in which all "kinds" of plants and animals appear in stages lasting millions of years.
[3] The French naturalist Alcide d'Orbigny held similar ideas; he linked different stages in the geologic time scale to separate creation events.
[4] The idea that there had been a series of episodes of divine creation of new species with many thousands of years in between them, serving to prepare the world for the eventual arrival of humanity, was popular with Anglican geologists like William Buckland in the early 19th century; they proposed it as an explanation for the patterns of faunal succession in the fossil record that showed that the types of organisms that lived on the earth had changed over time.
[5] The Scottish geologist and evangelical Christian Hugh Miller also argued for many separate creation events brought about by divine interventions, and explained his ideas in his book The testimony of the rocks; or, Geology in its bearings on the two theologies, natural and revealed in 1857.
[12] Proponents of the Progressive creation theory include astronomer and apologist Hugh Ross, whose organization, Reasons To Believe, accepts the scientifically determined age of the Earth but seeks to disprove Darwinian evolution.
[15] Ross ties this literal view of a lengthy seventh day to the Creation account in which he describes the Hebrew word "yom" to have multiple translation possibilities, ranging from 24 hours, year, time, age, or eternity/always.
[18] From a theological perspective, Robert Newman addresses a problem with this particular model of lengthy Genesis days, in that it puts physical plant and animal death before the fall of Man, which according to most Young Earth creationism is considered unscriptural.
Another problem with Progressive Creationism is due to the complicated nature of a model that arises from an attempt not to favor science over Scripture and vice versa, potentially angering both schools of thought with this compromise.