Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Darwin's Sorest Trouble
How immeasurable would be the advance of our science
could we but bring the chief events which it records into
some relation with a standard of time!
William Sollas
Like most small boys brought up in a religious community, as
would have existed in the Methodist enclaves of Gateshead at the
turn of the twentieth century, Arthur Holmes and his friend Bob
Lawson did not often find their favourite reading in the Bible.
But in years to come Arthur well remembered his parent's Bible,
and the magic fascination of the date of Creation, 4004
BC
, which
appeared in the margin of the first page.
'I was puzzled by the
odd “4”'
, he wrote.
'Why not a nice round 4000 years? And
why such a recent date? And how could anyone know?'
But
all he learnt from his parents was that to question the 'Word of
God' was simply 'not done'. This Biblical time barrier was fur-
ther reinforced in Arthur's mind at Sunday School through the
teachings of Philip Gosse, a Victorian naturalist who considered
he had reconciled Hutton's geological findings with the
Scriptures in his distinguished book
Omphalos
. In this work no
compromise was called for. It was only necessary to believe that
the Earth was created about 6000 years ago, in strict accordance
with Biblical chronology, 'exactly as it would have appeared at
that moment of its history, if all the preceding eras of its his-
tory had been real'. In other words, God had created the world
