What key events led up to Biblical Authority being challenged and compromised in the modern era?

While the Reformation was gaining strength, so was the Enlightenment. The Reformers sought liberty from sin in Christ, while those enraptured by the Enlightenment sought liberty to sin by denying sin itself. The atheistic ideals began to charge ahead, but they were unable to gain much ground because Biblical Authority was held so strongly. The great creation scientists who came out of the Reformation held to a Biblical worldview for understanding the natural world, yet those with evolutionary ideas began to push back against a Biblical worldview. It was their direct intent to discredit the book of Genesis, especially the early chapters.

It was clear that attacking Genesis would demolish the foundations of Christianity. If God is no longer Creator and Genesis is but a fairy tale, then God as Redeemer is both absurd and unsubstantiated. Secular geologists like Lyell and Hutton hated the Scripture and began to press eons of time into the Earth's Geologic Record with great veracity. Evolution in the sense of goo-to-you now had the hypothetical time by which to occur.

These atheistic ideas spread like wildfire, and naturalistic philosophies of life now had an alleged leg to stand on. The Church was afraid of scorn and ridicule in light of the Galileo incident (which never disproved the Scripture in anyway ironically), and so the Church quickly compromised in attempt to preserve her reputation amongst the secular elite. The Day-Age Theory, Gap Theory, Theistic Evolution, and a Local Flood quickly sprang up as quick band-aids to these gaping wounds. The naturalists quickly exposed the holes in these arguments, and the Church began to question Biblical Authority on a broader scale until the Resurrection was denied and everything else with it.