The Test of Time - The Rocks Don't Lie - page 88

accusing him of being an atheist. Hutton immediately began working on a greatly expanded
version of his theory that would show how God established the world's geological order
at an unknowable date in the distant past and would terminate it at some unknowable date
in the future. Just when the world began and when it would end were metaphysical issues
beyond the reach of rational inquiry.
While frantically working to reframe and support his case, Hutton contracted a debilitat-
ing illness from which he never recovered. He completed two of three planned volumes of
his Theory of the Earth despite great pain, which goes a long way toward explaining why
the topic is famously unreadable. Hutton died in March 1797, shortly after scathing reviews
once again dismissed his ancient planet theory as a warmed-over version of Aristotle's pa-
gan eternal world.
Hutton's Irish nemesis kept at it, marshaling geological evidence to defend Werner's
Neptunism against Hutton's heat-driven theory and its heretically ceaseless cycles of uplift
and erosion. Published in 1799, Kirwan's Geological Essays attacked Hutton's theory on
moral and religious grounds. Kirwan thought the idea of an ancient Earth undermined soci-
ety's foundation: “how fatal the suspicion of the high antiquity of the globe has been to the
credit of Mosaic history, and consequently to religion and morality.” 4 Kirwan found Hut-
ton's arguments so absurd that in preparing his rebuttal he reportedly didn't even bother to
read the Scotsman's topic.
Instead, like others before him, he came up with another novel theory to explain Noah's
Flood. As Kirwan's primitive Earth precipitated from primordial fluid, the water level
gradually sank to that of the present oceans, leaving the continents high and dry. Misinter-
preting frozen mammoth remains as drowned African elephants, Kirwan proposed a new
idea to explain how their bones got to northern Europe and Siberia. In the beginning, long
before the Flood, a globe-covering sea gradually retreated down into great rifts in Earth's
crust. Much later, all that water was released suddenly, triggering Noah's Flood somewhere
between India and the South Pole and transporting the remains of tropical animals to Siber-
ia. No Northern Hemisphere creatures were found in the Southern Hemisphere, but ele-
phants (mammoths) kept turning up in gravel deposits at high latitudes. Unaware that these
enormous carcasses were almost always solitary (and quite hairy), Kirwan imagined that