ETS 2001: Boundaries on creation and Noah's Flood: Early 19
th
century British Scriptural Geologists
Terry Mortenson, PhD
tmortenson@AnswersInGenesis.org
P. 5
about the next half-century. The respected Anglican clergyman, George Stanley Faber (1773-
1854), began advocating the day-age theory in 1823.
13
This was not widely accepted by
Christians until Hugh Miller (1802-56), the prominent Scottish geologist and evangelical friend of
Chalmers, revived it in the 1850s.
14
Also in the 1820s the evangelical Scottish zoologist, Rev. John Fleming (1785-1857), began
arguing for a tranquil Noachian deluge,
15
and in the late 1830s the prominent evangelical
Congregationalist theologian, John Pye Smith (1774-1851), advocated a local creation and a local
Flood, both of which supposedly occurred in Mesopotamia.
16
And then as German liberal
theology was beginning to spread in Britain in the 1830s, the view that Genesis is a myth, which
conveys only theological and moral truths, started to become popular.
So from all this it should be clear that by 1830, when Lyell published his uniformitarian
theory, most geologists and much of the church already believed the earth was much older that
6000 years and that the Noachian Flood was not the cause of most of the geological record. Lyell
is often given too much credit (or blame) for the church's loss of faith in Genesis. In reality, most
of the damage was done before Lyell, often by Christians, who were otherwise quite Biblical, and
this compromise was made at a time when geologists knew very little about the rocks and fossils
of the earth.
Nevertheless, many Evangelicals and High Churchmen still clung to the literal view of
Genesis. In fact, up until about 1845 the majority of Bible commentaries on Genesis taught a
recent six-day creation and a global catastrophic flood.
17
So in the early 19
th
century there were
competing old-earth geological theories of the earth and competing interpretations of the early
chapters of Genesis. And the Scriptural geologists fought against all these ideas.
Philosophical developments
As a prelude to this Genesis-geology controversy, the 18
th
century also witnessed the
spread of two competing worldviews: deism and atheism. These two worldviews flowed out of
the Enlightenment, in which human reason was elevated to the place of supreme authority for
determining truth. Apart from the Deists' belief in a Creator God and a supernatural beginning to
the creation, they were indistinguishable from atheists in their views of Scripture and the physical
reality. In Deism, the Bible is merely a human book, containing errors, and not the inspired Word
of God, and the history and function of the creation can be totally explained by the properties of
matter and the "inviolable laws of nature." Deists and atheists often disguised their true views,
especially in England where they were not culturally acceptable. Many of them gained influential
13
George S. Faber, Treatise on the Genius and Object of the Patriarchal, the Levitical, and the Christian
Dispensations (1823), Vol. 1, chap. 3.
14
Hugh Miller, The Two Records: Mosaic and the Geological (1854) and Testimony of the Rocks (1856),
107-74.
15
John Fleming, "The Geological Deluge as Interpreted by Baron Cuvier and Buckland Inconsistent with
Moses and Nature," Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, Vol. XIV (1826), 205-39.
16
John Pye Smith, Mosaic Account of Creation and the Deluge illustrated by Science (1837) and Relation
between the Holy Scriptures and some parts of Geological Science (1839).
17
See the detailed analysis of commentaries before and during this period in my thesis (footnote 2 above),
pp. 53-67.