Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
party who wrote the history of their nation as a progressive approach to their
political ideals:
The sin in historical composition . . . is to abstract events from their context
and set them up in implied comparison with the present day, and then to
pretend that by this "the facts" are being allowed to "speak for themselves." It
is to imagine that history as such . . . can give us judgments of value—to
assume that this ideal or that person can be proved to have been wrong by the
mere lapse of time. (105-106)
Whiggish history has a particularly tenacious hold in science for an obvious
reason—its consonance with the cardinal legend of science. This myth holds
that science differs fundamentally from all other intellectual activity in its
primary search to discover and record the facts of nature. These facts, when
gathered and refined in sufficient number, lead by a sort of brute-force
inductivism to grand theories that unify and explain the natural world.
Science, therefore, is the ultimate tale of progress—and the motor of advance
is empirical discovery.
Our geological textbooks recount the discovery of deep time in this whiggish
mode, as a victory of superior observation finally freed from constraining
superstition. (Each of my subsequent chap- ters contains a section on such
"textbook cardboard," as I call it.) In the bad old days, before men rose from
their armchairs to look at rocks in the field, biblical limitations of the Mosaic
chronology precluded any understanding of our earth's history. Burnet
represented this antiscientific irrationalism, so well illustrated by the
improper inclusion of "sacred" in his titular description of our planet's
history. (Never mind that he got into considerable trouble for his allegorical
interpretation of the "days" of Genesis as potentially long ages.) Burnet
therefore represents the entrenched opposition of church and society to the
new ways of observational science.
Hutton broke through these biblical strictures because he was willing to place
field observation before preconception—speak to
Search WWH ::
Custom Search