After the Reformation Europe entered into a series of religious wars. There were other reason for the wars, political reasons and what not, but one of the driving forces of those wars was religion. People back then took their religion seriously. After the end of the 30 years war in Central Europe and the English Civil War, both with heavy religious components, Europe was exhausted and pulled away from religious extremism and started to accept pluralism, even if it was forced on them.
While the Reformation was moving a pace a revolution in scientific knowledge was going on at the same time. This commonly referred to as the Scientific Revolution as many people say that it started with Copernicus's's "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies" and Vesalius' "On the Fabric of the Human Body" both published in 1543.
Both of these "Revolutions" (I certainly think the Reformation was a revolution in religious thinking) changed the way that the world was viewed. All kinds of new discoveries were being made and it was found that the ancients were not always right. Everything was to be subjected to reason and logic, nothing was going to be accepted on authority as it had in the past. This included the Bible.
Around 1800 the Bible started to be subjected to the same kind of scrutiny that any other piece of literature was given. In 1835 George Strauss wrote the "Life of Jesus" in which he explained the miracles of Jesus as natural occurrences that were misunderstood. Strauss was not the first to start questioning the Bible, or the miracles of Jesus, but he was the first to publish a book about it. I've actually read Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" has some great insights into the writing of the Bible.
At about this same time Joseph Smith was receiving the Book of Mormon and other divine revelations, and he taught that "The Bible was correct so far as it was translated correctly." Also, in the Book of Mormon the writers admitted that there might be mistakes in there writings, after all they were humans and humans make mistakes.
Throughout the 19th Century Christianity was subjected to an Enlightened understanding, which resulted in liberal theologies. People were too smart to accept miracles, and that God did not come down and interact with humans. In America one reaction to this was a set of tracts that were written called "The Fundamentals." These were a set of writings that set out the "fundamentals" that any Christian should believe. These tracts were funded by some wealthy men who gave the tracts away to ministers and others and they were very influential. These led to some Christians being called Fundamentalist's. One of the things that these tracts put forth was that the Bible was inerrant. Inerrant means that there are no mistakes in the Bible.
I've done quite a bit of reading Christian sites on the internet, and I can tell you that there are a lot of people out there who believe that the Bible is inerrant. I know that's not scientific but there it is, and I believe that that belief is unsustainable. A few years ago I read a book that was put out by Deseret Books, and I believe it was called the "Faith of Scholars." In that book one scholar told of going to a theology school and at the end of it a fellow student told him that she was jealous of him because when they first started she thought that he was an ignorant Mormon, but at the end of their studies he still had his faith and she had lost hers. He said that it was because of the difference of their beliefs when they started. He wasn't bothered when mistakes were found, while his fellow student was and her frame work of belief could not hold up to the assault. So at the end of the course of study the evangelical had lost her faith, but the LDS scholar had.
