We are sailors each, one and all. The terrestrial stage may seem implacable, the epitome of stability and permanence; this is an illusion. You and I, and all we know, are castaways on grand luxury liners which ply an ancient sea. But our ship is no mere ephemeral mortal construct of wood and metal bobbing in a solution of salt. We journey through time on the backs of mighty rafts of granite and basalt, crafted over eons by relentless forces, each weighing trillions of tons, stretching for thousands of miles, adrift in a global ocean of roiling lava and white-hot nickel-iron. Our earthen vessels are but fragile skiffs, paper thin, congealed skins of rock and mineral shielding us lovingly from the hellish inferno a scant few dozen miles beneath our feet. Brent and I invite our fellow travelers to come sail away with us in a multi-part series as we review the story of how a host of maverick gentleman naturalists of the early 19th century came to understand our place in this planetary drama, shook off the last vestiges of Biblical Literalism before Darwin was in diapers, and created a new science which would one day unveil the secrets of our planet.

Modern geology represents an unlikely and surprisingly fruitful union of what were once two schools of thought bitterly opposed to one another. The more progressive uniformitarianism, or uniformism for short, and an older view called Catastrophism which grew out of Biblical Literalism.

For thousands of years Young Earth Creationism was the prevailing scientific consensus in the western world. This view was informed by a rigid, literal reading of Genesis: The earth and everything in it was made for mankind in seven days of Creation. How old was our planet? That answer, like the answer to all questions of nature, could be found in the pages of the Old Testament. James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin was highly regarded in his day as a churchman and as a scholar. The Bishop’s most enduring work was a straightforward application of adding up the genealogies in the Old Testament, together with some clever inferences, to calculate the age of the earth. Our planet it turns out was created on October 23, 4004 BC, at nine o’clock in the morning. The layers of rock and earth were laid down as the Noachian Deluge subsided. One can find the remains of the unfortunate marine life which perished in the Flood even on the highest ground. Fossils of clams, fish, and snails, dotted the surface of high passes and towering peaks as testimony to this global cataclysm. This school of thought would eventually give rise to the general theory known as Catastrophism. But early naturalist had been drawn to the Alps, and there, surrounded by the serene, breathtaking natural splendor, perhaps feeling less constrained by the dogma of earlier religious beliefs, they began to find reason to question the allegory of Genesis and the epic of Noah.

The biggest problem with Young Earth scenarios can be summed up in one word: Heat. Volcanoes produce heat, meteor impacts produce heat, the formation of many types of rock and mineral produces heat, radiodecay produces heat, it takes heat and pressure to hold water in the gaseous vapor phase, and so forth. Compress all that heat into a few thousands years, and the resulting temperature would be more than enough to broil the earth.

Georges Leclerc knew none of that, his keen intellect was trapped in the 18th century after all. Yet he was one of the first to initiate a change of venue that would lead to the downfall of orthodox Young Earthism. A misfit of sorts, Leclerc had been born into wealth and privilege, a member of the French Aristocracy. But he stubbornly resisted a career in Law, philosophy, or for what passed as medicine in those times. He preferred the vistas of nature and the intricacies of science to the polished halls of privilege and the age old art of political schmoozing. Leclerc was among the first wave of naturalists, along with James Hutton , to seriously propose hypothesis and publish experimental data challenging the date of creation produced by Bishop Ussher. Leclerc reasoned that the earth was hot, volcanoes and fissures demonstrated this for anyone to see. And since hot things cool off, the earth must have been much hotter in the past. He sat about trying to estimate how old the earth would have to be if it had started out in a molten state. Leclerc found the world would have to be at least 75,000 years old to have cooled off so precipitously! It doesn’t sound like much time, when viewed through the lens of modern geology, but it was almost twenty times the accepted age. Not content with keeping the concept to himself, he published this finding and others in The Epochs of Nature in 1780. Predictably, a torrent of righteous fundamentalist criticism was heaped upon the author for straying from Church Doctrine. A number of religiously inclined figure heads opined that Leclerc would have been better off “studying the rocks in his brain” than those littering the Swiss Alps. In this he was fortunate; it took more than intellectual curiosity to question two-thousand years of dogma, it required courage. Just a few decades earlier the man could have easily found his head hanging on the business end of pike, after wailing out his last screams of agony from inside a wall of flames as he was cooked alive.
Leclerc’s calculations, crude, inexact, and inherently flawed, nevertheless pointed in the right direction, and encouraged others that the principles of math and science could shed light on the age of the world. One of the gentlemen Leclerc and Hutton would inspired was Charles Lyell, who would expand on the idea of an ancient earth, and by the time he was done, geology and theology would never be the same.

Fast forward two-hundred years, and an obscure Professor of Engineering by the name of DR Henry Morris would resurrect Young Earth Creationism and Flood Geology from its tomb, camouflaging the discredited religious doctrine of medieval Europe within a flimsy charade of quasi-science. Morris published a number of books beginning with The Genesis Flood in 1961 arguing that our planet indeed began a few thousand years ago, and that most of the geological evidence preserved in layer after layer of strata was created in the Biblical Deluge. Had he used any other cover than fundamentalist Christianity for his quaint parable, odds are he would have been more or less ignored. But because he invoked the idea that the Bible was on his side, Christians who wouldn’t have bothered to give him the time of day in the post Sputnik panic of the early 1960s cocked their ears receptively. Thus, the modern Creationist movement was born in America. It’s puzzling that Morris, a hydrological engineer by trade, was unable or unwilling to apply the most basic principles of thermodynamics and meteorology to his views. But then, the organization he founded, The Institute of Creation Research, mandated that all students and faculty affirm an oath pledging allegiance to Young Earth Creationism and agreeing to discard any factual data which conflicted with it.

19 And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. 20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. 21

If one takes this passage literally, it means that all of the earth was covered in water including the mountains. The highest peaks are in the Himalayas which are just shy of 30,000 feet. I’ll round of for the purposes of my calculations and call it an even 10,000 meters or 10 kilometers.

That works out to a staggering 4.5 billion cubic kilometers of water. Where did such an influx of water come from, and more problematic for Flood Geology, where did it go? If this quantity of water were held as vapor before the flood, or after due to evaporation, it causes some serious thermal problems. For starters, the earth’s atmosphere would be 95% plus water vapor and extend to perhaps 200 km into space. To hold that quantity of water as a vapor would require a temperature and pressure somewhere around 350 C and 500-1000 times sea level pressure. If the water came from the “Fountains of the Deep” that would mean the crust would have to drop by 10 km, worldwide. It also means a geyser of superheated water every couple of square meters which would make Old Faithful in Yellowstone look like a tepid drinking fountain. Working out the kinetic energy release of a global crust drop of 10, 000 meters alone would melt the crust.

This was just one example of falsification. Young Earthism made predictions which can be examined using empirical observation. The lesson would be painfully learned by religious fanatics who are always trying to sneak fundamentalist dogma into the science curricula of public schools. The newest incarnation of creationism, Intelligent Design, would adjust by avoiding any predictions that could be falsified or openly associated with religious theology.

Charles Lyell would go on to popularize Uniformism. His contributions to the burgeoning science of geology would influence many, among them a shy, inquisitive young man by the name of Charles Darwin. But that’s a story for our next installment.