William Buckland: Encyclopedia II - William Buckland - Flood geology

William Buckland - Flood geology

In 1818 Buckland was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. That year he persuaded the Prince Regent to endow an additional Readership, this time in Geology, and he became the first holder of the new appointment, delivering his inaugural address on 15 May 1819. This was published in 1820 as Vindiciae Geologiae; or the Connexion of Geology with Religion explained, both justifying the new science of geology and reconciling geological evidence with the biblical accounts of Creation and Noah's Flood. At a time when others were coming under the opposing influence of James Hutton's theory of uniformitarianism, Buckland developed his flood geology introducing the new hypothesis that the word "beginning" in Genesis meant an undefined period between the origin of the earth and the creation of its current inhabitants, during which a long series of extinctions and successive creations of new kinds of plants and animals had occurred. Thus his catastrophism theory incorporated a version of Old Earth creationism or Gap creationism.

From his investigations of fossil bones at Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire he concluded that the cave had actually been inhabited by hyaenas in antediluvian times rather than the fossils being remains of animals that had perished in the Flood and then carried from the tropics by the surging waters as was then thought. He developed these ideas into his great scientific work Reliquiae Diluvianae, or, Observations on the Organic Remains attesting the Action of a Universal Deluge which was published in 1823 and became a best seller.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Flood geology", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki