War of the World Views: Powerful Answers for an "Evolutionized" Culture (10 page)

For the first Eighteen centuries of church history the vast majority of christians believed that God had created the world about 4,000 years before christ and destroyed the earth with a global flood at the time of Noah. Today, most people in the world, including most people in the church, take for granted that the earth and universe are millions and millions (even billions) of years old. Our public schools, from kindergarten on up, teach these vast ages, and one is scoffed if he questions them. But it has not always been that way, and it is important to understand how this change took place and why.

Geology’s Early Beginnings

Geology as a separate field of science with systematic field studies, collection and classification of rocks and fossils and development of theoretical reconstructions of the historical events that formed those rock layers and fossils, is only about 200 years old. Prior to this, back to ancient Greek times, people had noticed fossils in the rocks. Many believed that the fossils were the remains of former living things turned to stone, and many early Christians (including Tertullian, Chrysostom and Augustine) attributed them to Noah’s Flood. But others rejected these ideas and regarded fossils as either jokes of nature, the products of rocks endowed with life in some sense, the creative works of God or perhaps even the deceptions of Satan. The debate was finally settled when Robert Hooke (1635–1703) confirmed by microscopic analysis of fossil wood that fossils were the mineralized remains of former living creatures.

Prior to 1750 one of the most important geological thinkers was Niels Steensen (1638–1686), or Steno, a Dutch anatomist and geologist. He established the principle of superposition, namely that sedimentary rock layers are deposited in a successive, essentially horizontal fashion, so that a lower stratum was deposited before the one above it. In his book
Forerunner
(1669) he expressed belief in a roughly 6,000-year-old Earth and that fossil-bearing rock strata were deposited by Noah’s Flood. Over the next century, several authors, including the English geologist John Woodward (1665–1722) and the German geologist Johann Lehmann (1719–1767), wrote books essentially reinforcing that view.

In the latter decades of the 18th century, some French and Italian geologists rejected the biblical account of the Flood and attributed the rock record to natural processes occurring over a long period of time. Several prominent Frenchmen also contributed to the idea of millions of years. The widely respected scientist Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) imagined in his book
Epochs of Nature
(1779) that the earth was once like a hot molten ball that had cooled to reach its present state over about 75,000 years (though his unpublished manuscript says about 3,000,000 years). The astronomer Pierre Laplace (1749–1827) proposed the nebular hypothesis in his
Exposition of the System of the Universe
(1796). This theory said that the solar system was once a hot, spinning gas cloud, which over long ages gradually cooled and condensed to form the planets. Jean Lamarck, a specialist in shell creatures, advocated a theory of biological evolution over long ages in his
Philosophy of Zoology
(1809).

Abraham Werner (1749–1817) was a popular mineralogy professor in Germany. He believed that most of the crust of the earth had been precipitated chemically or mechanically by a slowly receding global ocean over the course of about a million years. It was an elegantly simple theory, but Werner failed to take into account the fossils in the rocks. This was a serious mistake since the fossils tell much about when and how quickly the sediments were deposited and transformed into stone. Many of the greatest geologists of the 19th century were Werner’s students, who were impacted by his idea of a very long history for the earth.

In Scotland, James Hutton (1726–1797) was developing a different theory of Earth history. He studied medicine at the university. After his studies he took over the family farm for a while. But he soon discovered his real love: the study of the earth. In 1788 he published a journal article and in 1795 a book, both by the title
Theory of the Earth
. He proposed that the continents were being slowly eroded into the oceans. Those sediments were gradually hardened by the internal heat of the earth and then raised by convulsions to become new landmasses, which would later be eroded into the oceans, hardened and elevated. So in his view, Earth history was cyclical; and he stated that he could find no evidence of a beginning in the rock record, making Earth history indefinitely long.

Catastrophist—Uniformitarian Debate

Neither Werner nor Hutton paid much attention to the fossils. However, in the early 1800s Georges Cuvier (1768–1832), the famous French comparative anatomist and vertebrate palaeontologist, developed his
catastrophist
theory of Earth history. It was expressed most clearly in his
Discourse on the Revolutions of the Surface of the Globe
(1812). Cuvier believed that over the course of long, untold ages of Earth history, many catastrophic floods of regional or nearly global extent had destroyed and buried creatures in sediments. All but one of these catastrophes occurred before the creation of man.

Georges Cuvier
(1768–1832)

William Smith (1769–1839) was a drainage engineer and surveyor, who in the course of his work around Great Britain became fascinated with the strata and fossils. Like Cuvier, he had an old-earth catastrophist view of Earth history. In three works published from 1815 to 1817, he presented the first geological map of England and Wales and explained an order and relative chronology of the rock formations as defined by certain characteristic (index) fossils. He became known as the “Father of English Stratigraphy” because he developed the method of giving relative dates to the rock layers on the basis of the fossils found in them.

A massive blow to catastrophism came during the years 1830 to 1833, when Charles Lyell (1797–1875), a lawyer and former student of Buckland, published his influential three-volume work
Principles of Geology
. Reviving and augmenting the ideas of Hutton, Lyell’s Principles set forth the principles by which he thought geological interpretations should be made. His theory was a radical
uniformitarianism
in which he insisted that only present-day processes of geological change at
present-day rates of intensity and magnitude
should be used to interpret the rock record of past geological activity. In other words, geological processes of change have been uniform throughout Earth history. No continental or global catastrophic floods have ever occurred, insisted Lyell.

Charles Lyell
(1797–1875)

Lyell is often given too much credit (or blame) for destroying faith in the Genesis Flood and the biblical timescale. But we must realize that many Christians (geologists and theologians) contributed to this undermining of biblical teaching before Lyell’s book appeared. Although the catastrophist theory had greatly reduced the geological significance of Noah’s Flood and expanded Earth history well beyond the traditional biblical view, Lyell’s work was the final blow for belief in the Flood. By explaining the whole rock record by slow gradual processes, he thereby reduced the Flood to a geological nonevent. Catastrophism did not die out immediately, although by the late 1830s only a few catastrophists remained, and they believed Noah’s Flood was geologically insignificant.

By the end of the 19th century, the age of the earth was considered by all geologists to be in the hundreds of millions of years. Radiometric dating methods began to be developed in 1903, and over the course of the 20th century that age of the earth expanded to 4.5 billion years.

Christian Responses to Old-Earth Geology

During the first half of the nineteenth century the church responded in various ways to these old-earth theories of the catastrophists and uniformitarians. A number of writers in Great Britain (and a few in America), who became known as “scriptural geologists,” raised biblical, geological and philosophical arguments against the old-earth theories. Some of them were scientists, some were clergy. Some were both ordained and scientifically well informed, as was common in those days. Many of them were very geologically competent by the standards of their day, both by reading and by their own careful observations of rocks and fossils. They believed that the biblical account of Creation and Noah’s Flood explained the rock record far better than the old-earth theories.
¹

Thomas Chalmers
(1780–1847)

Other Christians in the early 1800s quickly accepted the idea of millions of years and tried to fit all this time into Genesis, even though the uniformitarians and catastrophists were still debating and geology was in its infancy as a science. In 1804 Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), a young Presbyterian pastor, began to preach that Christians should accept the millions of years; and in an 1814 review of Cuvier’s book, he proposed that all the time could fit between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. By that time Chalmers was becoming a highly influential evangelical leader and, consequently, this “gap theory” became very popular. In 1823 the respected Anglican theologian George Stanley Faber (1773–1854) began to advocate the day-age view, namely that the days of creation were not literal but figurative for long ages.

To accept these geological ages, Christians also had to reinterpret the Flood. In the 1820s John Fleming (1785–1857), a Presbyterian minister, contended that Noah’s Flood was so peaceful it left no lasting geological evidence. John Pye Smith (1774–1851), a Congregational theologian, preferred to see it as a localized inundation in the Mesopotamian valley (modern-day Iraq).

Liberal theology, which by the early 1800s was dominating the church in Europe, was beginning to make inroads into Britain and North America in the 1820s. The liberals considered Genesis 1–11 to be as historically unreliable and unscientific as the creation and flood myths of the ancient Babylonians, Sumerians and Egyptians.

In spite of the efforts of the scriptural geologists, these various old-earth reinterpretations of Genesis prevailed so that by 1845 all the commentaries on Genesis had abandoned the biblical chronology and the global Flood; and by the time of Darwin’s
Origin of Species
(1859) the young-earth view had essentially disappeared within the church. From that time onward most Christian leaders and scholars of the church accepted the millions of years and insisted that the age of the earth was not important. Many godly men also soon accepted evolution as well. Space allows only mention of a few examples.