Flood geology: Encyclopedia II - Flood geology - Origins of flood geology

Flood geology - Origins of flood geology

The science of geology was founded in Great Britain in the 18th century. Its practitioners sought to understand the history and shaping of the Earth through the physical evidence laid down in rocks and minerals. As many early geologists were clergymen, they naturally sought to link the geological history of the world with that set out in the Bible. The ancient theory that fossils were the result of "plastic forces" within the Earth's crust had by this time been abandoned, with the recognition that they represented the remains of once-living creatures. This, though, raised a major problem: how did fossils of sea creatures end up on land, or on the tops of mountains?

As early as the 2nd century AD, Christian thinkers had proposed that fossils represented organisms that were killed and buried during the brief duration of the Flood. This theory became commonly held, aided by the geological peculiarity that much of northern Europe is covered by layers of loam and gravel as well as erratic boulders deposited hundreds of miles from their original sources. This was interpreted as being the result of massive flooding, though it is now believed they are the product of ice age glaciations (an unknown phenomenon at that time). Geologists proposed that the Great Flood had been a time of massive upheavals, with old continents sinking and new ones rising, thus transforming ancient seabeds into mountain tops.

Flood geology as the attempt to substitute natural causes for miracles can be dated from the publication of An Essay Toward a Natural History of the Earth (1695) by John Woodward and New Theory of the Earth (1696) by Woodward’s disciple William Whiston (Porter, Lindberg and Numbers, 2003, pp 420-1).

By the early 19th century, however, this view had fallen into disrepute. It was already thought that the Earth's lifespan was far longer than that suggested by literal readings of the Bible (an age of 75,000 years had been suggested as early as 1779, as against the 6,000 years proposed by Archbishop James Ussher's famous chronology). Charles Lyell's promotion of James Hutton's ideas of uniformitarianism advocated the principle that geological changes that occurred in the past are understandable from present-day phenomena. In common with Newton, Hutton assumed that the world-system had been in a steady state since the day of creation, but unlike Newton he included in this vision not only the motion of celestial bodies and processes like chemical change on earth, but also processes of geological change. Christopher Kaiser writes:

The idea that all geological strata were produced by a single flood was rejected in 1837 by the Reverend William Buckland, the first professor of geology at Oxford University, who wrote:

Although Buckland continued for a while to insist that some geological layers related to the Great Flood, he was forced to abandon this idea as the evidence increasingly indicated multiple inundations which occurred well before humans existed. He was convinced by the Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz that much of the evidence on which he relied was in fact the product of ancient ice ages, and became one of the foremost champions of Agassiz's theory of glaciations. Mainstream science gave up on the idea of flood geology, which required major deviations from known physical processes.

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