In either case, people commonly assumed that hill and mountains they saw around them had always existed more or less as they were.
The 18th-century naturalists began to see evidence that the hills and mountains were not eternal but were the result of past processes and were slowly changing.
That gave birth to the idea that Earth had a history.
As the naturalists of the 18th century made the first attempts to thoughtfully and logically explain the nature of Earth by looking at the evidence, they were inventing modern geology as a way of understanding Earth.
What Copernicus , Kepler, and Newton did for the heavens in the 1500s and 1600s the first geologists did for Earth beginning in the late 1700s.
Of course, the invention of geology as the study of Earth led directly to the modern attempts to understand the geology of other worlds.