Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Hutton had converted his field companions, but who else would believe that the world was
unbelievably old? Who else would dare to imagine that cycles operating at a planetary scale
could explain the origin of rocks and ultimately the world we see around us?
When Hutton published his
Theory of the Earth
in 1795, Werner's Neptunism dominated
geological opinion. Hutton's near-vertical layers of once-horizontal secondary rock, by
then widely acknowledged to predate the Flood, told of far more than Burnet's collapsing
crust or Werner's gradually drying oceans. Hutton argued that mountains and oceans traded
places over and over again in a global dance of erosion and sedimentation that demon-
strated a divine design. He rejected the role of catastrophes like the biblical flood not only
because they ran counter to his own observations but because periodic destruction of the
world ran counter to his view of a divine design to everything on Earth. Faith in the per-
fection of God's principles favored slow geological change—uniformity of action rather
than violent catastrophes. Hutton saw Earth as a grand machine set in motion by natural
laws that ran a perpetually self-renewing system he famously characterized as having “no
vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.”
3
His peers thought him crazy.
To some degree, the cool reception of Hutton's ideas reflected the politics of his time.
Upper-class British intellectuals shocked by the excesses of revolutionary France saw a
rising tide of atheism as fueling the horrors of the guillotine. Hutton's rejection of both
conventional biblical chronology and Noah's Flood as the driving force of geologic history
placed him in league with radicals set on overthrowing civilization. It hardly mattered that
Hutton himself was deeply conservative. His ideas about an ancient Earth challenged tra-
dition and authority.
Still, the rocks at Siccar Point simply did not fit into the model of a global flood as the
singular event in earth history. The rocks were evidence of two geological eras separated
by an abyss of time. Any way one looked at it, the eons necessary to explain the cycle of
worlds apparent in Hutton's two rounds of uplift and erosion did not fit with a literal read-
ing of Genesis.
Hutton's critics were not easily deterred. In 1793 one of Werner's students, Richard Kir-
wan, savaged Hutton's theory in the
Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy
, essentially
