Glenn
Thanks for your comments on 19c y ec and Mortenson., who stretchs credulity
by trying to show how competent these anti-geologists of the 19c were. If
you read his section on AIG he fails to prove his point. Except for George
young there were poor at geology.
It seems that history of science is coming into vogue with books like
Cadbury on dinosaur Hunters and Winchester on Smith. Their common weakness
is that they assume Christians were literalist and anti-geology which is
bunk/rubbish/garbage/trash.
Winchester is one of the worst and I enclose what I wrote in a review of The
Map that changed the World.;
"Secondly, Winchester has a totally inaccurate understanding of the British
churches in relation to the rise of geology and simply repeats, with
exaggerations, the old myths that there was a mighty war of Genesis and
geology in the early 19th Century. He refers to the "church" negatively some
thirty times and it gets tedious. His prejudice surfaces most blatantly on
p29, 'The hunch that God might not have done precisely as Bishop Ussher had
suggested,., was beginning to be tested by real thinkers, by rationalists,
by radically inclined scientists who were bold enough to challenge both the
dogma and the law, the clerics and the courts.'' Or to put not to fine a
point on it, only those who were not Christians in any way. Here Winchester
is writing of the 1790s a mere one hundred years after the Revd John Ray and
Edward Lhwyd were questioning the age of the earth. In fact throughout the
previous century most thinkers Christian or deist thought the earth was
older than Ussher's estimate. What is the dogma and the law which forbade
suggestions of an old earth? Granted some clerics did hold to Ussher's age
but the vast majority did not. Lastly, who was under any threat from the law
for holding to millions of years? How does Winchester explain that it was
clerics Richardson and Townsend who spread Smith's ideas and Playfair Hutton
's? In his discussion of the clerical trio Buckland, Sedgwick and Conybeare
he manages not to mention that they were ordained and any reader of the book
could be forgiven if he did not realise that Sedgwick was a devout
evangelical cleric! Winchester simply cannot accept that a clergyman could
actually accept geological ages without challenging his faith, as is
evidenced by his comments on Lewis, who helped Murchison unravel the
Silurian in 1831. He wrote,'Many of the . fossilists were .called divines -
a curious happenstance, considering the assault that any intelligent
understanding of fossils would later have on divinity's most firmly held
notions, like the Creation and the Flood. The Reverend Thomas Lewis of
Ross-on-Wye is characteristic of the type:' (p115) This can only be
described as complete and utter nonsense, if not bigotry. The author has
absolutely no knowledge of the doctrine of Creation or the Flood and is
ignorant of how the clerical geologists actually thought. His section
dealing with Ussher (p16-21) is both flippant and inaccurate and even gets
the first day of creation on Monday 23 October (day one) and the creation of
animals on the Thursday 26 October(day six)! Actually Ussher wrote, 'Sexto
die, Octobris vigesimo octavo' and it was Friday the day before the Sabbath!
This kind of lampoon is fine for Peter Simple in the Daily Telegraph but not
for a serious Guardian journalist. Winchester has simply not grown out of
the outworn conflict thesis of science and religion, which by now should
have been rejected by any who dabbles in the history of science and
Christianity. However it is a persistent myth which is propagated through a
popular misunderstanding. This myth encourages both unbelief and
creationism."
For the early 19c we should note that many of the geologists were christian,
devout clergy and often evangelcial e.g. Fleming. Sedgwick, Conybeare and
possibly Henslow and Buckland. The usual argument that they were Broadchurch
or liberal in theology is wrong
Michael
----- Original Message -----
From: "Glenn Morton" <glenn.morton@btinternet.com>
To: "Asa@Calvin. Edu" <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2002 4:43 AM
Subject: John Murray 1840 young earther
> I have been doing some reading of 19th century young-earthers. I ran into
> an Answers in Genesis site, which claimed that Murray was one of the best
> 19th century youngearthers, and one of the most geologically competent. I
> have critiqued that view
> see
> http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/murray.htm
>
>
>
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