Geology Reference
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message has rarely reached working geologists, who seem to crave these
simple and heroic stories.
Modern Cardboard
If Lyell cast his version in cardboard, later retellings of the great dichotomy
became even more simplistic. First of all, the two sides received names—
catastrophism for the vanquished, uniformitarianism for the victors. Names
wrap any remaining subtlety into neat packages. Secondly, the catastrophist
position became more foolish and caricatured in the constant retelling. In
particular, Lyell noted that the 5000-year time scale of Genesis had faded
from respectability by 1800, and that his scientific colleagues could only
stand accused (at most) of not allowing sufficient millions in their revised
estimates (this switch in opinion prompted Lyell's transition in metaphors
from Egyptian mummies to accelerated centuries). But later textbooks have
usually blurred this distinction and imagined that the catastrophists of Lyell's
own day still adhered to the Mosaic chronology. This ludicrous error then
permits the final step—the enthronement of Lyell as the man who made
geology a science by rejecting the explicitly miraculous (the only way to
cram the complexities of history, as unraveled by 1830, into a mere 5000
years). Catastrophists, in short, became biblically motivated miracle-
mongers, actively preventing the establishment of geology as a proper
science. Later in this chapter, I shall show that catastrophists of Lyell's day
were fine scientists who accepted both an ancient earth and the
methodological meanings of uniformity. The notion that catastrophism
implies biblical chronology is a logical error, for the two flanks of the central
argument are not symmetrical. A 5000- year time scale does commit any
adherent to global paroxysm as a mode of change, but belief in worldwide
catastrophe need not imply a young earth. The earth might be billions of
years old, and still concentrate its changes into paroxysmal moments.
For example, Loren Eiseley, in the best-known modern article about Lyell,
confuses old-style biblical literalism, quite passé among
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