ETS 2001: Boundaries on creation and Noah's Flood: Early 19
th
century British Scriptural Geologists
Terry Mortenson, PhD
tmortenson@AnswersInGenesis.org
P. 3
New theories about the history of creation
In contrast to the long-standing young-earth creationist view, different histories of the earth
began to be developed in the late 18
th
century, which were evolutionary in character. Three non-
Christian French scientists were prominent and all were either atheists or very skeptical theists.
In 1778 Buffon (1708-88), a nominal Catholic, but probably a secret skeptic, postulated that the
earth was the result of a collision between a comet and the sun and had gradually cooled from a
molten lava state over at least 78,000 years.
7
Laplace (1749-1827), an open atheist, published his
nebular hypothesis in 1796.
8
He imagined that the solar system had naturally and gradually
condensed from a gas cloud during a very long period of time. In his Zoological Philosophy of
1809, Lamarck (1744-1829), who road the fence between deism and atheism, proposed a theory
of biological evolution over long ages, known as the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
New theories in geology were also being advocated at the turn of the 19
th
century as geology
began to develop into a disciplined field of scientific study. Abraham Werner (1749-1817) was a
German mineralogist and probably a deist. Although he published very little, his impact on
geology was enormous because many of the 19
th
century's greatest geologists had been his
students. He theorized that the strata of the earth had been precipitated chemically and
mechanically from a slowly receding universal ocean. In his mind the earth was at least one million
years old. His oceanic theory was quickly rejected, but the idea of an old-earth remained with his
students.
The Scotsman, James Hutton (1726-97), was trained in medicine but turned to farming for
many years before eventually becoming interested in geology. In his Theory of the Earth,
published in 1795, he proposed that the continents were gradually and continually being eroded
into the ocean basins. These sediments were then gradually hardened and raised by the internal
heat of the earth to form new continents, which would be eroded into the ocean again. With this
slow cyclical process in mind, Hutton could see no evidence of a beginning to the earth, a view
that precipitated the charge of atheism by many of his contemporaries, though he too may have
been a deist.
Neither Werner nor Hutton paid attention to the fossils in rocks. But another key person in
the development of old-earth geological theories, who did, was the Englishman,William Smith
(1769-1839). He was a drainage engineer and surveyor and helped build canals all over England
and Wales, which gave him much exposure to the strata and fossils. He is called the "Father of
English Stratigraphy", because he produced the first geological maps of England and Wales and he
developed the method of using fossils to assign relative dates to the strata.
9
As a vague sort of
theist who embraced a catastrophist theory like Cuvier's, he too imagined that the earth was much
older than the Bible taught.
The Frenchman, Georges Cuvier (1768-1832), was a comparative anatomist and a Lutheran,
who popularized the catastrophist theory of earth history. By studying fossils found largely in
7
Buffon, Epochs of Nature (1778).
8
Laplace, Exposition of the System of the Universe (1796).
9
William Smith, Strata Identified by Organized Fossils (London, 1816) and Stratigraphical System of
Organized Fossils (London, 1817).