Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Lyell's careful arguments and exposition mollified some, although by no means all, crit-
ics. Soon after Lyell's topic was published, Sedgwick attacked Lyell's insistence on the uni-
form operation of processes through geologic time. Catastrophes were necessary to explain
the deformation of strata and how ancient seabeds could be lifted up to form new land.
Lyell's carefully constructed arguments may not have worked on Sedgwick, but they began
to convert Buckland.
Within a decade, new discoveries convinced Buckland that Lyell was right. The volcanic
cones of central France really were compelling evidence that valleys had not been incised
by a global flood. Buckland's own fieldwork demonstrated that the drift, the great gravel
sheet he had long attributed to Noah's Flood, was not deposited in a single event. There
had been several episodes of deposition involving material from different sources. In his
Bridgewater treatise Buckland reveals the influence of Lyell's
Principles
when he states
that the physical laws governing geological processes were as uniform as the law of gravity
governing the orbits of planets.
It was Buckland who bore the brunt of clerical attacks after his abandonment of Noah's
Flood. Conservative clergy may have seen Lyell as a godless radical, but they saw Buck-
land—the former champion of biblical geology—as a traitor. A new breed of scriptural
geologists and clergy with limited knowledge of geological discoveries rose to defend
Moses and attack Buckland. They recycled the discredited arguments of Burnet and Wood-
ward and invoked Noah's Flood to explain secondary rocks, fossils, and the lay of the land.
In one of the least vitriolic clerical responses to Buckland's recantation, William Cock-
burn, Dean of York, claimed that there was no more to earth history than an initial six days
of Creation and Noah's Flood about a thousand years later. A clergyman known for railing
against what he saw as anti-Christian scientific ideas and theories, Cockburn revived even
then discredited reasoning creationists still use to defend their preferred interpretation of
Genesis. He ignored the work of Hutton, Cuvier, and Lyell.
Spelling out his ideas in a pamphlet attacking Buckland's new views, Cockburn attrib-
uted the formation of the primary rocks to the initial Creation after which primordial wa-
ters laid down the secondary rocks. Not much else happened until Noah's Flood, which
therefore had to explain the entire fossil record. The bones of giant creatures lay in the
oldest strata because these animals were too heavy for the ark and had drowned. Human
