Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
exotic fossils like those from Kirkdale Cave and unlike modern species. Other evidence in-
cluded giant blocks of granite from Mont Blanc scattered well beyond the Alps. Rejecting
a southern origin for the Flood, he argued that Europe's surficial gravel and stray boulders
came from identifiable northerly sources. He also maintained that the violent floodwaters
carved valleys far too deep and wide to have been cut by the piddling rivers that flowed
through them today.
In coming to these conclusions, Buckland relied on what he saw with his own eyes.
Nowhere did he invoke scriptural authority, even if it framed his view. His reasoning
was compelling enough that others hailed his explanation as vindication for the reality of
Noah's Flood. Like Cuvier, he did nothing to discourage the idea. After all, his defense of
a global flood had its rewards. Even before his work on Kirkdale Cave, Buckland received
the Royal Society's prestigious Copley Medal. Appointed Canon of Oxford's Christchurch
Cathedral three years later, he eventually became Dean of Westminster, one of the most
prestigious positions in the Anglican Church.
Buckland was hardly alone in thinking he had found evidence of Noah's Flood. Adam
Sedgwick, who held Woodward's old chair as professor of geology at Cambridge and
taught Darwin his geology, summarized conventional thinking in 1825.
The sacred records tell us—that a few thousand years ago 'the foundations of the great deep' were broken up—and
that the earth's surface was submerged by the water of a general deluge… [which] has left traces of its operation
in the diluvial detritus which is spread out over all the strata of the world.
6
Not long afterward, cracks began developing in Buckland's geological case for a global
flood.
The end began when flood skeptics like John Fleming, an evangelical pastor in the
Church of Scotland and professor of natural philosophy at Aberdeen, questioned the argu-
ments and conclusions of flood champions like Cuvier and Buckland on theological as well
as geological grounds. Fleming's 1826 article in the
Edinburgh Philosophical Journal
used
logic and literal interpretations of scripture to challenge Buckland's version of the Flood.
Fleming opened with the problem of how Buckland could attribute extinctions to the
Flood when the Bible said that two of every creature boarded the ark. If Noah saved a pair
of all the world's animals, then geologists could not blame extinctions on the Flood. And
