There is the closed, naturalist presupposition on one hand. It is modern thinking. It started with Huxley, and Huxley pushed Darwin against his misgivings to publish. Darwin had those misgivings because of his Christian wife who showed him it would make people 'animal'. She was right. But that's what Huxley wanted. (You can follow some of this in the bio-pic CREATION).
Another factor would be the work of Archbishop Usher and his chronology. He determined that the earth must have been created in 4004 BC through Biblical genealogies. Thus there was not only a very young earth, but there was a sort of view that nothing else happened at all.
This does not answer such questions as: even if the week of creation was that recent, was the material of earth that recent?
What about gaps in genealogies where less significant people are deleted?
What about many worldwide deluge references that happen after the ice age in those accounts and often correspond to about 9000 years ago? If that's the flood of Noah, then we have to place Adam to Noah before that taking us back to maybe 15,000 years ago, which is the shortest range of much anthropology for homo sapiens. We're not talking about a conflict of millions of years discrepant but just a few thousand. Seen that way, there is "no final conflict" as Dr. Schaeffer would say.
Another thing not understood in Usher's day or even through much of the 1900s was the comparative cults around the area of Israel when Gen 1-11 was written. We now know that most had a cosmology in which there was a pre-existing condition before creation and it was chaos and/or needed to be stopped or defeated. The defeat and forming of this earth for mankind is 'creation.' Sometimes it was a huge creature, a lizard, and there are a couple references to this in Job or Psalms. Gen 1:2 refers to the earth being already 'formless and void' which is an expression about a condition that needed to be judged and destroyed by God and F&V is the residue of that.
What would surprise the neighbor religions and cultures is not that much so far; it would be that the LORD was the victor over that. That message was being spread around every traveler's campfire where Gen 1-11 was recited by Hebrews, if they were asked to tell the story of their people. Those cultures would hear that the LORD created this world and then Israel was rescued from Egypt and then were brought to the Canaanite cult area to stop its child-conception-and-sacrifice ritual.
The pre-existing topic is rarified and difficult to square away. Besides those comparative accounts, Job 38 refers to Satan already being his evil self before the earth was created and that God had to shake out the earth to get rid of him and his rebellious angels like a person shaking out a carpet or tent. Peter and Jude refer to rebellious angels being confined in blackest darkness in the universe, and guess how the earth is first described in Gen 1: dark, black, watery. In addition Peter says they were consigned to hell, but uses the Greek term 'tartarus' which is the place where Greek myth located evil super-beings before the creation of man. Was that simply to communicate to Greeks? To form a bond of understanding? Does it shows some credibility to that pre-historic understanding?
The NT does not hesitate to say that the universe is full of spiritual beings, entities, demons, and angels, and says that the existence of the church shows God's truth to these beings and that the Gospel can cause people to love each other across earthly differences, Eph 3:10.
