Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
because the Bible and the topic of nature shared the same author. In the opening decades
of the nineteenth century, even Pope Pius VII endorsed viewing the six days of Creation as
of indeterminate length rather than as a literal week of twenty-four-hour days. A little more
than a decade after publication of Paley's popular topic, in 1813, English geologist Robert
Bakewell sought to reconcile the geological and biblical chronologies in his
Introduction to
Geology
, the first geological textbook published in English, arguing that the Mosaic chro-
nology began when the world became fit for human habitation.
Others argued that a long time passed between the initial Creation in the first verse of
Genesis and the formless Earth of the second verse. Perhaps the time between when God
created the world long ago and when he remodeled it for human use wasn't recorded in the
Bible, leaving an indeterminate gap between the first two verses of Genesis. The gap the-
ory, as this idea became known, provided an alternative to the day-age theory that each day
of creation lasted far longer than twenty-four hours.
Two centuries ago, Christian scholars adapted how they read the Bible to account for
geological revelations. And why not? The history of the world that geologists had found
in the rocks followed the order of events described in Genesis—an initial period of time
without life, followed by the introduction of plants and animals, and eventually people. If
the days of Creation referred not to a single week of breakneck change but to a long series
of geological ages, the problem that more than six days was needed to account for prehis-
tory became an interpretive detail that did not imperil scriptural authority. Nowhere, Buck-
land asserted, did Genesis contradict the idea that the modern world was built upon the ru-
ins of prehuman worlds. With one foot in the newborn profession of geology and the other
in Anglican orthodoxy, Buckland was a man of deep conviction and few doubts.
Most geologists love the field aspect of our work, and Buckland appears no different. He
went on field excursions across Britain and Europe, accompanying natural philosophers he
visited and in the company of those visiting him. He traced the occurrence of durably hard
yet smoothly rounded quartzite pebbles in surficial gravels from Oxford north to Warwick-
shire. There, he found these distinctive pebbles eroding from outcrops of conglomerate,
rock formed when gravel and sand were buried deep enough to turn back into solid rock.
This unusual formation was known as pudding stone due to the resemblance of the gravel
set in a sand matrix to plums in a Christmas pudding. Through his geological sleuthing,
