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Perhaps no other branches of modern science have become so fraught in their perceived relationship with religion as geology and evolution. We saw in the last chapter how the so-called “Debate” in Oxford in June 1860 has been inflated into the classic event in the “conflict” between science and faith, to become one of the twentieth century’s most persistent myths. But what I want to do in the present chapter is trace the historical roots of geology and evolution. My aim is to show that neither the geological nor the evolutionary ideas that emerged were as new or quite as shocking as we are sometimes led to believe, and to disprove the myth that until On the Origin of Species hit the bookshops, in November 1859, everyone obediently believed what the priests told them; namely, that the earth had been created at 9 a.m. on 21 March 4004 BC. Just as it does not say in the book of Genesis, in fact. So how did this and other individual dates in 4004 BC come to be put forward?
The received mythology tells us that it was the seventeenth-century Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, who pronounced the 4004 BC date. But like so many tales, it is only partially true. Since both Judaism and Christianity have always been faiths that practise the very highest standards of scholarship and critical accuracy in their interpretation of Scripture, it was early rabbis and Christian scholars who first enquired into when key events in the Old Testament actually took place. When exactly did King David reign, when did Jehovah first speak to Abraham in the land of Shinar, and when did the creation itself take place? Good historical scholarship, in fact, considering the factual data that were available 2,000 years ago, and a million miles from superstition.
In the total absence of any naturalistic indicators, such as geological strata, to give guidance, how did the early “chronologists” date the creation? Well, it was argued, the Jewish Scriptures contain some interesting numbers that might yield a clue. Genesis tells us that God made the world in six days, while Psalm 90 sings, “One thousand ages in Thy sight are but as yesterday.” So is each creation day meant to represent one epoch of 1,000 years? And then, if you add up the years that have elapsed since Adam and Eve, using the Genesis dates of the patriarchs (Methuselah, for instance, died at 969 years old), you get back to 4004 BC – depending, that is, on how many years you allocate to a generation, for other chronologists came up with different numbers. And this, I would emphasize, in the absence of any naturalistic indications, such as strata or fossils, would have seemed a perfectly reasonable way of approaching the age of the earth.
We must remember, however, that chronologists such as Philo of Alexandria, Julius Scaliger, and Archbishop Ussher did not share the agenda of modern scientists, and it is an abuse of scholarship to presume that they did. They were less concerned with the age of our planet as a physical object in space than with tracing divine providence through history, and to attempt to read Genesis as a key to exact scientific facts, past and future, is as misplaced as trying to use modern genetics to discover what the angels are made of.
And when we examine Archbishop Ussher’s Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti (“Annals of the Old and New Testaments”), 1650–4, we find that he is not trying to do cosmology so much as to date events in the Old Testament, such as the reigns of the kings, wars, or individuals’ lives. And he does this just as intelligently as any modern-day historian might, given the limited sources available 360 years ago. He attempts, whenever possible, to establish collateral dates from non-biblical sources, which, in a pre-archaeological age, meant clues in the Greek historical and travel writers such as Herodotus of c. 440 BC, whose Histories gave the most detailed information about ancient Egypt available before 1800. Ussher’s purpose in dating the creation is primarily to establish the “beginning of the biblical story”, as it were; he is not engaged in a piece of pseudo-scientific mummery, as many agenda-driven secularists would lead us to assume.
Coming not from a historical but from a physics direction, however, Ussher’s younger contemporaries, Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley, were perhaps the first to try to date the creation from naturalistic evidences. In the brilliant and perceptive twenty-seven “Earthquake Discourses” which he delivered to the Royal Society, the first series ending in 1668 and the rest delivered by 1700, and which were sumptuously published in 1705, Robert Hooke effectively founds geological science. He collects data, worldwide, about earthquakes, tidal waves, and volcanic eruptions, as a way of attempting to understand the workings of the globe. But more importantly from our point of view, he draws some remarkable conclusions from the geology of his native Isle of Wight and the British south coast. (1) Judging from the parallel fossil-bearing strata beds across the Solent, the Isle seemed to have once been attached to the Dorset and Hampshire mainland. (2) There were rich beds of marine fossils at the Isle’s western tip, opposite Hurst Castle, that were now sixty feet above the high-tide point. (3) There were no known living equivalents for some of these marine fossils found in the strata, such as the giant ammonites. So had they become extinct? (4) Why were there no human or modern animal remains in the strata – only extinct shellfish? (5) Had the Isle of Wight and adjacent mainland once been the bed of a long-dried-up ocean? (6) And, drawing upon evidences brought in by travellers from as far afield as Switzerland, the West Indies, Indonesia, and China, were there not visible physical indicators in the rocks of the earth’s antiquity, and endless change? (7) Could it be, therefore, that the earth was vastlyancient, and that Noah’s Flood, recounted in Genesis, was merely the last of an immemorial cycle of earth-forming geological catastrophes that had taken place long, long before – between the time of God’s original act of creation and his replanting of a chaotic earth to create the Garden of Eden, in around 4004 BC, and crown his creation by making Adam and Eve? For after all, so Hooke tells us, recent translations of Chinese literature seemed to indicate an incredibly ancient earth.
Of course, not for a moment did Hooke see his work as challenging the glory of God. Rather, it demonstrated that our God-given intelligence enabled us to fathom out all sorts of things in the world of nature. And if one wants an indication of Hooke’s good standing in ecclesiastical circles, one has merely to remember that in 1691, his old friend John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury, conferred a Lambeth MD degree upon him! Further, if you read Hooke’s published Diary, 1672–80, you can see how many prominent Anglican clergymen he ranked among his friends and dining companions!
And in the 1680s and 1690s, Hooke’s younger protégé, Edmond Halley, published a series of brilliant physical studies in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, which laid the foundation of modern meteorology and global climatology. Studies, indeed, in evaporation, rainfall, wind movement caused by solar heating, erosion, and continent-changing. Had the earth’s surface been formed not just by volcanoes, but also by bombardment of large comets from space? (In 1690, they thought comets were large solid bodies.) Had what is now England once formed the bed of a tropical sea? And all this during those vast eras that had elapsed between the creation and the divine planting of Eden – or the world as we know it today? Could even Noah’s Flood have been caused by naturalistic mechanisms? Halley calculated that if the whole earth had been subjected to a constant forty-day downpour that was equivalent to the heaviest measured tropical storm, then far from the sea covering the mountains, the resulting rise above existing global sea levels would be a mere 132 feet! And could this inundation have hit the earth as it passed through the – presumably aqueous – tail of a comet? It is true that some contemporaries suggested that Halley might be a deist or even worse, but that did not prevent him from becoming Savilian Professor of Geometry in Oxford in 1703, or Astronomer Royal at Greenwich in 1720.
The eighteenth century saw various mechanisms proposed by scientists to explain the development of the cosmos. The Frenchman Pierre Simon Laplace suggested in 1796 that the solar system may have condensed out of matter once ejected from the young sun; while the astronomer Sir William Herschel, as he told the Royal Society on 19 June 1817, saw the universe as revealed in his large telescopes as dynamic, developing, and unbelievably vast. Indeed, as he tried to fathom its “length, breadth, and depth; or longitude, latitude, and profundity” (a phrase curiously reminiscent of St Paul’s “breadth, and length, and depth, and height” of Christ’s love, Ephesians 3:18), Herschel realized that he was looking into “times past”, for it had probably taken centuries for the light of the dimmest visible stars to reach us!
And as they considered the tiny speck of the earth in this vastness, early geologists began to ask whether the earth had been formed by repeated floods (the “Neptunists”), of which that of Noah was merely the last, or by constant volcanic change (the “Vulcanists”). The pioneer Vulcanist was the Edinburgh physician and amateur field geologist Dr James Hutton, who in the 1790s suggested that Edinburgh’s Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags were the eroded granite plugs of a gigantic volcano, whose surrounding ash cone had once covered the site of modern Edinburgh. The leading Neptunist was Gottfried Werner of Freiburg, who drew attention to the importance of the sedimentary, or water-originating, rock strata in forming the modern earth.
And very importantly, it should be borne in mind that no one was punished for expressing these ideas (as we saw in Chapter 4, even the medieval Catholic Church, while punishing theological heresies, had no particularly repressive policies with regard to science itself, nor had the Protestants). What some people had for sometime been suggesting was that the reason why none of these earth-forming events had been mentioned in Scripture was because no human beings, made in the image of God, existed on earth in those days. For the Bible, as Galileo had reiterated in 1615, was to teach us how to go to heaven, and not how the heavens (or earth) go! And the man who was to hammer this point home in the early nineteenth century was a senior Oxford clerical scientist, the Revd Canon Dr William Buckland, reader in geology and mineralogy, of Christ Church Cathedral and College, Oxford. Since Scripture was a revelation of God’s plan for his immortal-soul-bearing human creation, not for ichthyosauri, why should God mention primitive lizards in his Genesis revelation? Let God-given human intelligence unravel their history for its own curiosity!
Two major discoveries paved the way for modern geology soon after 1800. The first was when the French Protestant scientist Georges Cuvier realized that he could use his anatomical knowledge to “articulate” scattered fossil bones to re-create prehistoric beasts. And what a sensation that caused in Paris! The first three-dimensional dinosaurs, indeed: although the word “dinosaur” (“terrifying lizard”, from the Greek) was itself coined by the Anglican English anatomist Sir Richard Owen in 1840.
The second discovery was made by the canal surveyor and amateur geologist, William Smith, around 1815, when he found that the occurrence of fossils in rocks was not indiscriminate: specific fossils only occurred in specific sedimentary rocks. Could it be that God had created creatures in a clear, progressive anatomical sequence, with primitive life forms in the lowest strata and increasingly anatomically sophisticated ones in the higher? And why were there such exact dividing lines between the strata as one excavated them in a rock face? Could it be that, as Cuvier had proposed, God sent great natural “catastrophes” to the ancient earth, wiping out primitive species and entombing their remains in the strata, and then repopulated the globe with “higher” creatures? And allowed ingenious men to uncover his plan, millions of years later? And far from being punished, Smith was given an honorary doctorate by Trinity College, Dublin, and Buckland and his clerical friends were blazing a geological trail across the British Isles by 1825.
Indeed, by 1825 geology had become something of a national passion. Could one trace the effects of Noah’s Flood in the English landscape? By 1836, however, Buckland was coming to think of the Flood as perhaps not universal across the planet, so much as a flood affecting the Middle East – “the whole world” as people in Old Testament times understood it. The rapidly advancing science of field geology did not appear to show traces of a global flood on the landscape. And by the 1840s, influenced by the glaciation studies of the Swiss scientist Jean Louis Agassiz, Buckland was coming to attribute “Flood” damage to an ancient Ice Age. For did not some of the Scottish glens bear a resemblance to the glaciated valleys of Switzerland?
The whole “Catastrophist” school of geology was challenged in 1830 by Sir Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology put forth an alternative idea. Could not the earth have been formed by endless slow changes, or “causes now in operation”, such as wind, water, “normal” earthquakes, and erosion, given vast periods of time, have gently, yet inexorably, remodelled the globe? Charles Darwin read Lyell’s Principles aboard HMS Beagle as he sailed out from Plymouth in 1831, and came to see the geology of South America and the Pacific basin as formed not by global catastrophes so much as by endless little changes, over countless millions of years. This slowly changing, stable geological landscape would provide a necessary environment in which, by 1839, he would come to see species gradually evolving.
And what mighty force was infusing European and American culture during this “geological” age? Romanticism. Writers, musicians, and artists were inspired by grandeur and high emotional charge, from the dreamy landscapes of J. W. M. Turner to the bizarre gothic poems of Edgar Allen Poe. And science was seen as intensely “Romantic”. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) was inspired by recent discoveries in electricity and physiology, while Sir William Herschel’s cosmology seemed mind-blowing in the vastness it revealed. And geology, with its immense time spans, “dinosaurs”, and the idea that mountains and continents were but temporary things, fitted perfectly into this way of thinking.
Yet far from viewing these discoveries as undermining Christianity and the Bible, men such as Buckland in Oxford and his Cambridge professorial geological counterpart and Prebend of Norwich Cathedral, the Revd Dr Adam Sedgwick, who taught Darwin field geology, saw them as strengthening their faith. For was not the “God of the Fossils” even grander, in the sheer richness and majesty of his creative and sustaining power, than the God of the simpler complete act of creation described in Genesis? And had not God given us intelligence to uncover new wonders within his works that Moses on Sinai had never been told of?
Of course, this did not mean that the Bible account of creation was wrong. Yes, God had created the earth and the cosmos from nothing, and had populated the world with a staggering diversity of living things, and had created man in his own image. It was, rather, that he had done so on a vastly greater scale, with all its myriad detail and complexity, than it had been necessary to tell the children of Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai in 1500 BC. This was the natural theology of the original founders of the Royal Society, on a scale of magnificence that even perhaps Robert Boyle could scarcely have envisaged back in 1660. To men like Buckland, Sedgwick, and the majority of their contemporaries, indeed, science and God were intimately bound up together, and one could trace the work of the “divine hand” in the landscape and sky, and in the laboratory. Romanticism and revelation together, in fact! “Philosophers with hammers”, as Sedgwick styled geologists.
And as I mentioned above, geology became a national passion, as the well-to-do visited the Scottish Highlands in summer, a geological hammer in one hand and a copy of Sir Walter Scott in the other. Both energetic ladies and working men on their days off took up “geologizing”, adding fossils to their cabinets of curiosities; while Miss Mary Anning, of Lyme Regis, Dorset, became such a skilled fossil geologist that she was deferred to by Professor Buckland, himself a West Country man. The devout Christian stonemason–poet, Hugh Miller, made the transition from Scottish working man to famous geologist and author of the best-selling Footprints of the Creator (1850) and other books. And swelling the “fraternity of the geological hammer” were country gentlemen, retired military officers, doctors, working men, ladies, and legions of clergymen.
Both Buckland and Sedgwick were charismatic and entertaining men, and had influential “fans” in high places, such as Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. And for more than a fifty-year period, moreover, both men taught geology to large classes of young gentlemen in Oxford and Cambridge, not to mention giving sell-out lectures at British Association and other convivial meetings – which could be attended by ladies. Geology was always a popular subject for lectures at the Working Men’s Institutes, too. So how many thousands of people had sat at Buckland’s and Sedgwick’s feet over the decades, in the universities, in London, in the provincial societies, and elsewhere? How many future clergy, journalists, dons, teachers, lawyers, politicians, colonial administrators, civil servants – and even working people – had been exposed to the latest ideas in geology, science, and religion in their lectures (and let us not forget students of other geological academics in the new London and four Scottish universities, and in Trinity College and Cork College, Ireland)? And then add to that the impact of the widespread publication of popular books and magazine articles!
Yet while no one was questioning the fact of the new fossil discoveries, there was, one must admit, an increasingly marginalized constituency of people who did not accept Buckland’s and Sedgwick’s ancient earth interpretations: the “Scriptural Geologists”. When, for example, the British Association met at York, in 1844, the Very Revd Sir William Cockburn, Dean of the Minster, caused uproar by delivering an address condemning the geologists for their failure to interpret Genesis literally! We know from a letter of Mary Buckland that her husband was not sorry to be leaving Oxford in 1845, upon becoming Dean of Westminster; this, however, was not occasioned by any specific persecution of science in Oxford at this time so much as by a perceived indifference, amidst the theological feuds then breaking out in the university between the Anglo-Catholics John Henry Newman, Edward Pusey, and their supporters and the “Low Church” evangelicals, to whom even the slightest whiff of “Popery” was anathema.
Yet to assume that when Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published, towards the end of 1859, it horrified and stunned a nation of simple biblical fundamentalists who all swore by a creation date of 4004 BC, is pure nonsense. Mythology set in stone, no less!