Page 4

ETS 2001: Boundaries on creation and Noah's Flood: Early 19

century British Scriptural Geologists

Terry Mortenson, PhD

tmortenson@AnswersInGenesis.org

P. 4

the Paris Basin he believed that over the course of untold ages there had been at least four regional
or nearly global catastrophic floods, the last of which probably was about 5000 years ago.

This

obviously coincided with the date of Noah's Flood, but Cuvier never explicitly made this
identification in his published theory.

Finally, Charles Lyell (1797-1875), a trained lawyer turned geologist and probably a deist

or unitarian, began publishing his three-volume Principles of Geology beginning in 1830. Building
on Hutton's uniformitarian ideas, Lyell insisted that the geological features of the earth can, and
indeed must, be explained by slow gradual processes of erosion, sedimentation, earthquakes and
volcanism operating at essentially the same rate and power as we observe today. By the 1840's
his view became the ruling paradigm in geology. So, at the time of the Scriptural geologists there
were three views of earth history (appendix 1).

It should be noted that two very influential geologists in England (and in the world) at this

time were William Buckland (1784-1856) and Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873). Buckland became
the head professor of geology at Oxford University in 1813 and Sedgwick gained the same
position at Cambridge in 1818. Both were ordained Anglican clergy and both initially promoted
old-earth catastrophism. But under the influence of Lyell they both converted to
uniformitarianism with public recantations in the early 1830s. Buckland is often viewed as a
defender of Noah's flood because of his 1823 book, Reliquiae Diluvianae. But this apparent
defense of the flood was actually a subtle attack on it, as Scriptural geologists accurately
perceived. Because of their powerful positions in academia and in the church Sedgwick and
Buckland led many Christians in the 1820's to abandon their faith in the literal interpretation of
Genesis and in the unique and geologically significant Noachian Flood.

One more thing needs to be mentioned about geology at this time. The world's first

scientific society devoted exclusively to geology was the London Geological Society, founded in
1807. From its inception, which was at a time when very little was known about the geological
formations and fossils in them, the London Geological Society was controlled by the assumption
that earth history is much older and different from that presented in Genesis. And a few of its
most powerful members were Anglican clergy.

Christian compromises with old-earth geological theories

During the early 19

century many Christians made various attempts to harmonize these

old-earth geological theories with the Bible. In 1804, the gap theory began to be propounded by
the young pastor, Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), who soon became one of the leading Scottish
evangelicals.

This became the most popular reinterpretation of Genesis among Christians for

Georges Cuvier, Theory of the Earth (Edinburgh, 1813). This was the first English translation of the

French original, "Discours Préliminaire" in Recherches sur les ossemens fossils de quadrupèdes (Paris, 1812).

It was the editor and publisher of Cuvier's English editions, Robert Jameson, who made the clear

connection between Cuvier's last catastrophe and Noah's Flood, no doubt to make it more compatible with British
thinking at the time. The Oxford geologist, William Buckland made this idea even more popular. See Martin
Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 133-35.

William Hanna, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Chalmers (Edinburgh,1849-52), I:80-81;

Thomas Chalmers, "Remarks on Curvier's Theory of the Earth," The Christian Instructor (1814), reprinted in The
Works of Thomas Chalmers (1836-42), XII:347-72.