Scriptural geologist

Scriptural geologists (or mosaic geologists) were "a heterogeneous group of writers" in the early nineteenth century, who claimed "the primacy of literalistic biblical exegesis" and a short 'Young Earth' time-scale. Their views were marginalised and ignored by the scientific community of their time. They "had much the same relationship to 'philosophical' (or scientific) geologists as their indirect descendants, the twentieth-century creationists." Paul Wood describes them as "mostly Anglican evangelicals" with "no institutional focus and little sense of commonality". They generally lacked any background in geology, and had little influence even in church circles.

Background

Reason for appearance

British Geology had been theologically based until the last decades of the eighteenth century. Rupke notes that classical scholarship in Britain traditionally turned to documents, such as the Bible, when it came to questions concerning world history and chronology. Scripture provided its foundational assumptions and its primary purpose was to explain geological data in terms of Creation and the Flood. It clung on among amateurs and popular geologists long after Hutton,

It became difficult, beginning in the 19th century, for the convention mind to accept, without loss of faith, the revolutionary assertion that the geological process knows “no vestige of a beginning-no prospect of an end.” The first British attempt to face the problem posed by the new geology was by Thomas Chalmers, an minister of the Scottish Kirk. In 1804, he proposed that there was a sense in which Scripture and “modern” geology could agree, but “only at the cost of a remarkable reinterpretation of Scripture.” Reduced to its simplest terms, the early verses of Genesis recorded not one Creation but two; and the aeons of geology fall between. Thus there may have been an " interval" [or “Gap”] between the primal Creation and the Six Day's work--time for all of geologic history. Chalmers’ suggestion was favorably received by theological liberals, the party of "reconciliation," such as Edward Hitchcock, W. D. Conybeare, and the future Cardinal Wiseman. “It became the refuge of Buckland, when he retreated from his youthful diluvial orthodoxy” toward uniformitarianism. Sharon Turner included it in her children’s book A Sacred History of the World. The gap theory became almost the official British rival to the continental framework hypothesis.Most important was its appeal to many simple clergymen such that it had popular pulpit and pamphlet circulation. “Until about I850, the casual pulpit or periodical assurance that geology does not conflict with revelation was based, in possibly seven instances out of ten, on Chalmers' gap theory.” There were only two ways in which sincere men could be expected to treat this new geology: they could work out a compromise with it, or utterly repudiate it. Both schools had strenuous and able advocates and no one thought permitting the errors of the opposite school to go undisputed. “The outcome was a pamphlet war of considerable extent, which engaged the abilities of genuinely competent men for roughly half a century.”

The British scriptural geologists' writings came in two waves before Darwin's writings on evolution. The first, in the 1820s, was in response to 'gap theory' and included Granville Penn's A Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaical Geologies (1822) and George Bugg's Scriptural Geology (1826). The second, in the 1830s, was in response to Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology and William Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise, Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology, which diverged from flood geology. Responses included George Fairholme's General View of the Geology of Scripture (1833) and The Mosaic Deluge (1837).

Geological competence

Professor of intellectual history David N. Livingstone states that scriptural geologists "were not, as it turns out, geologists at all", concluding that "while it may be proper to speak of Scriptural Geology, it is not really accurate to speak of Scriptural Geologists." L. Piccardi and W. Bruce Masse state that "[a]part from George Young, none of these scriptural geologists had any geological competence". David Clifford states that they were "not themselves geologists" but rather "keen but biased amateurs" and that one of them, James Mellor Brown, "felt that no scientific expertise was required when examining scientific matters." Taking a more positive view, Milton Millhauser states that the leaders of the party were "by no means ignorant of the science [they] assailed" and that Granville Penn "had studied geology".

Reception

By their contemporaries

Adam Sedgwick condemned Andrew Ure's A New System of Geology in his Presidential Address to the Geological Society in 1830, 'pulled it to pieces without mercy', calling it a "monument of folly".

Hugh Miller described Granville Penn as one of "the abler and more respectable anti-geologists" and "certainly one of the most extensively informed of his class," Miller described Penn's view of Biblical verses that conflicted with his own views as "mere idle glosses, ignorantly or surreptitiously introduced into the text by ancient copyists." Thus he wrote:

It need not surprise us that a writer who takes such strange liberties with a book which he professes to respect, and which he must have had many opportunities of knowing, should take still greater liberties with a science for which he entertains no respect whatsoever, and of whose first principles he is palpably ignorant.

Adam Sedgwick generalized in 1830 that they had promoted "a deformed progeny of heretical and fantastical conclusions, by which sober philosophy has been put to open shame, and sometimes even the charities of life have been exposed to violation." Early in 1834 he added that,

Scriptural geologist Henry Cole responded to Sedgwick in kind. He referred to Sedgwick's ideas as "unscriptural and anti-Christian," "scripture-defying", "revelation-subverting," and "baseless speculations and self-contradictions," which were "impious and infidel".

Contemporary of George Young, geologist Martin Simpson described Young's Geological Survey as "in every way worthy of a pupil of the celebrated Playfair."

By historians of science

A number of modern historians have "rounded on scriptural geologists as simplistic fundamentalists who defended an untenable and anti-scientific worldview". Historian of science Charles Gillespie chastised a number of them as "men of the lunatic fringe, like Granville Penn, John Faber, Andrew Ure, and George Fairholme, [who] got out their fantastic geologies and natural histories, a literature which enjoyed surprising vogue, but which is too absurd to disinter". Gillespie describes their views, along with their "reasonably respectable" colleagues (such as Edward Bouverie Pusey and William Cockburn, Dean of York), as clerical "fulminations against science in general and all its works", and listed the works of Cockburn and Fairholme as among "clerical attacks on geology and uninformed attempts to frame theoretical systems reconciling the geological and scriptural records." Martin J. S. Rudwick initially dismissed them as mere 'dogmatic irritants', but later discerned a couple of points of consilience: a concern with time and sequence; and an adoption of the pictorial conventions of some scriptural geologists by the mainstream.

Bibliography of works by scriptural geologists

• 1820, Rodd, Thomas (Philobiblos), A Defence of the Veracity of Moses
• 1822, Penn, Granville, A Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaical Geologies
• 1822, Young, George, A Geological Survey of the Yorkshire Coast
• 1826, Bugg, George, Scriptural Geology
• 1829, Ure, Andrew, A New System of Geology
• 1833, Brown, James Mellor, Reflections on Geology
• 1833, Fairholme, George, General View of the Geology of Scripture, and 1837, The Mosaic Deluge
• 1833, Nolan, Frederick, Analogy of Revelation and Science Established
• 1834, Cole, Henry, Popular Geology Subversive of Divine Revelation
• 1836, Gisborne, Thomas, Considerations on the Modern Theory of Geology
• 1837, Fairholme, George, The Mosaic Deluge
• 1838, Cockburn, William, A Letter to Professor Buckland Concerning the Origin of the World
• 1838, Rhind, William, Age of the Earth, Considered Geologically and Historically
• 1838, Young, George, Scriptural Geology
• 1839, Cockburn, William, The Bible Defended Against the British Association

See also

• Young Earth creationism
• Flood geology
• Biblical literalism
• Genesis creation narrative

References

• Brooke, John Hedley; Cantor, G. N. (2000). Reconstructing nature: the engagement of science and religion. ISBN 019513706X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Clifford, David (2006). Repositioning Victorian Sciences: Shifting Centres in Nineteenth-Century Thinking. City: Anthem Press. ISBN 1843312123. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Gillispie, C. C. (1996). Genesis and Geology. London: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674344812. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Livingstone, David; Hart, Darryl G.; Noll, Mark A. (1999). Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195115570. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Millhauser, Milton (1954). "The Scriptural Geologists: An Episode in the History of Opinion". Osiris. 11. Saint Catherines Press: 65–86. doi:10.1086/368571. Retrieved 2009-08-25. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Simpson, Martin (1884). The Fossils of the Yorkshire Lias. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Wood, Paul (2004). Science and Dissent in England, 1688-1945. Aldershot: Ashgate. ISBN 0754637182. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Further reading

• Morrell, Jack (1984). Gentlemen of Science. London: Royal Historical Society. ISBN 0861931033. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Lynch, John (2002). Creationism and Scriptural Geology, 1817-1857. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. ISBN 1855069288.
• Bugg, George (1826). Scriptural geology: or, Geological phenomena, consistent only with the literal interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures, upon the subjects of the creation and Deluge; in answer to an "Essay on the theory of the earth". Hatchard and Son. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)