Dear Stephen
Will this be OK for starters - my chapter out of the book The Discovery of
Time ed S McCready . I wrote this two years ago and now find I was not
strong enough on the lack of YEC in the 18th century. Recently I have found
that it was Buffon who devised the Gap Theory in 1770s and not Chalmers. It
really stuffs up YEC as something which went out in c1660s with a slight
revival in the 1820s to 1840 and bopped down by such evangelicals as
Sedgwick and Hitchcock and really only dates back to 1961 when M and W wrote
their little book.
Michael
*******
The Early church
The early Christians were more concerned about time and chronology and soon
began to elucidate the biblical chronology. Until 400AD the vast majority of
Christians believed that the earth would last only 6000 years and had
existed for about 5500 years when Christ was born. They argued the latter
from taking all biblical chronologies, especially those in Genesis 5 and 11,
literally. The former idea stemmed from "Chiliasm" - a belief that the
earth would last Six days of millennia (from Psalm 90 vs 4 and 2 Peter 3 vs
8). This was proclaimed, rather than reasoned, as in the Epistle of Barnabas
(c130 AD); "Therefore, my children, in six days - six thousand years, that
is - there is going to be the end of everything." This concern with the end
of the world, or the coming of the Millennium, may explain their great
interest in chronology.
An early example is Ad Autolycum by Theophilus of Antioch. Little is known
about him beyond that he became Bishop of Antioch in 169 AD and wrote this
volume after the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 AD. He was a Greek and was
strongly influenced by Jewish Christians. At the end there is a chronology
from creation to the death of Marcus Aurelius (d 180 AD), a duration of 5695
years, suggesting that Creation occurred in 5515 BC. The chronologies are
detailed and calculated from the biblical data and are not far off Ussher's
compilations and today's' estimates from Abraham to the Exile.
Theophilus was highly literalistic, while others, like Augustine, took the
days of Genesis allegorically; few reckoned the earth to be more than a few
thousand years old.
The Renaissance
The Renaissance was a time of broadening of horizons and exploration.
Columbus discovered the New World; Copernicus (1473-1543) rejected the
Ptolemaic system and proposed heliocentricity as the best explanation of the
relation of the sun and planets. There was a revival in the study of ancient
texts, classical and biblical, which also resulted in the Reformation. In
all this flowering of exploration, scholarship and literature there was a
sense of the unity of knowledge.
It also marked the dawn of a historical consciousness but concepts were few
and the Scriptures were some of few texts, which went back to the earliest
history. Thus attempts at the history of the world involved the fusing of
biblical and classical writings. An example is Sir Walter Ralegh's
(1552?-1618) History of the World, which he published in 1614 while in the
Bloody tower of the Tower of London. Ralegh considered the world to be
created in about 4000 BC and also gave a long dissertation on the four
rivers of the Garden of Eden (Genesis chap 2). Ralegh's date was the same
proposed by the Protestant reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546), the Roman
Catholic Cardinal Bellarmine (1542-1621), and the devisor of the map
projection, Mercator (1512-1594). A century earlier Columbus (1451-1506) was
more generous with 5443 BC. These few dates show how widely accepted a date
of 4000 to 5000 BC was for the origin of the earth. The majority of
Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians concurred on about 4000BC and the
Geneva Reformer John Calvin (1509-1564) typically reckoned "the present
world is drawing to a close before it has completed its six thousandth
year."
Chiliasm
As the Reformation progressed some developed a revamped Chiliasm. In the
early 1600s the Dutch Protestant theologian Josef Scaliger put creation at
25 October 3950 BC. (Autumn was a favoured time for Creation, as the fruits
would provide sustenance for the winter.) The most well-known Chiliaist was
Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh (1581-1656). Ussher, whose uncle was an
ancestor of the Queen (through an illegitimate niece of the Duke of
Wellington), was a very able scholar and no obscurantist. He became
Archbishop of Armagh in 1625. The most well-known of his works was Annales
Veteris Testamenti (1650), which was a solid piece of chronological
scholarship in which he argued from historical grounds that Jesus was born
not in 4BC. But he is remembered for his date of creation - 4004 BC. Despite
popular representations, he did not arrive at this figure from arithmetic
applied to dates of patriarchs and other Old Testament figures. To Ussher
there were six Chiliastic days of 1000 years apiece followed by the seventh
day of the Millennium. There were four Chiliaistic days before Christ and
thus Creation took place in 4004 BC, on the night before 23 October. Adam
was created on 28 October. This date causes amusement to many, but the rest
of Ussher's chronology was very sound for the 17th century as he was a
careful scholar. ( figure n.) His chronological calculations for the rest of
the Old Testament are close to today's estimates. Had not Ussher's
chronology been inserted in many English Bibles from 1704, he would probably
have been forgotten, except to historians who valued his careful work.
Theories of the Earth, 1660-1710
The Royal Society of London, founded in 1660, epitomised the flowering of
science both in Britain and the continent. The work of Robert Boyle, Isaac
Newton and others in physics and chemistry needs no introduction. Less
well-known is the natural history of John Ray (1627-1705), Edward Lhwyd
(1660-1709) and others. The period also saw the beginnings of a scientific
study of the earth and their findings were published in turgid volumes known
as "Theories of the Earth". On a first reading these seem to be a literal
reading of Genesis stories with a few semi-scientific glosses. A closer read
shows them to be more profound as they meld together the Bible, the
classics, almost mediaeval "book" learning with the citing of endless
authorities and scientific insight in a Chaos-Restitution interpretation of
Genesis One. Here they shared the outlook of most theologians (except
Ussher!) and literary writers such as Thomas Traherne and Alexander Pope.
Instead of taking the Creation story to teach creation in six short days,
writers, following an interpretation going back to the early Church Fathers,
claimed from Genesis (Chapter one verse one) that God first created Chaos
(without form and void) and after an interval recreated it in six days. The
duration of Chaos was undefined. With Ussher it was twelve hours, but for
most it was a long and unspecified duration. Some, notably Thomas Burnet
(1635?-1715), Edmond Halley (1656-1742) and William Whiston (1667-1752),
reckoned the days to be more than twenty-four hours. Halley attempted a
calculation of the age of the earth from the sea's salinity, but came to no
firm conclusions other than it was tens of thousands of years old. Likewise
theological writers of the day; Bishop Simon Patrick (1626-1707) reckoned
that God first created Chaos and then later re-ordered it in Six Days. He
said of the duration of Chaos, 'It might be . a great while;.' Few accepted
Ussher's date of 4004 BC for the initial Creation, though most accepted that
humanity first appeared in about the year 4000 BC, hence the general
acceptance of the rest of Ussher's chronology. The extension of time by the
"Theorists" and contemporary theologians was minute compared to the billions
of years of geological time, but was, as Stephen Gould wrote of Whiston's
argument that the day of Genesis one was a year long was, "a big step in the
right direction." In Britain the way was open for a longer time-scale.
Fossils and Geology
Not until the late 17th Century were "formed stones" or fossils recognised
as imprints of dead creatures rather than formed as "sports of nature" in
place. Only then could "fossils" be used to demonstrate former life and it
took a century before the succession of fossils was used to put strata into
historical order. Possibly the first person who used the succession of
fossils to demonstrate evolution was Charles Darwin in a notebook in 1838,
shortly before he "discovered" Natural Selection. In the 1690s there were
insufficient grounds to suggest "Deep Time" or the continual reworking of
the earth's crust as understandings of erosion were rudimentary. Ray,
Whiston and others cannot be expected to have done otherwise.
Most of the writers had some "scientific" understanding and often spent as
much time refuting each other as suggesting new ideas. Some were mostly
speculative, as was Thomas Burnet's The Theory of the Earth. Despite his
devotion to the Deluge, he sought to explain phenomena naturalistically and
somewhat extended the duration of Genesis One. John Ray's Miscellaneous
Discourses concerning the dissolution of the world shows the beginning of
careful observation on earth processes and questions over geological time.
After reading the first edition of Ray's Miscellaneous Discourses, Lhwyd
wrote to Ray on 30 February 1691, 'Upon the reading on your discourse of the
rains continually washing away and carrying down earth from the mountains,
it puts me in mind.which I observed', and then described what he had
observed in Snowdonia. He described innumerable boulders which had "fallen"
into the Llanberis valleys. (Most of these are glacial erratics.) As 'but
two or three that have fallen in the memory of any man., in the ordinary
course of nature we shall be compelled to allow the rest many thousands of
years more than the age of the world.' Ray commented on Lhwyd's findings and
seemed deliberately to avoid facing the logic of Lhwyd's comments. He nailed
his colours firmly to the fence, and did not explicitly reject an Ussher
chronology. However from his discussion of Chaos and other comments, it is
fair to conclude that he accepted that the earth was considerably more than
five-and-a-half thousand years old, but left the reader to decide.
Time in the Enlightenment
Often the 18th Century is presented as a geological Dark Age until Hutton
shed light with his theory in 1788. The 18th century did not see a rapid
advance in geology until about 1780, as observers continued the work of
their 17th century forbears. Geologically the most important question was
how to work out the historical succession of strata and that occurred at the
end of the century.
Two who broke loose from the Theories of the Earth were de Maillet and
Buffon. Benoit de Maillet (1656-1738) was a French diplomat with a sound
grasp of the geography and geology of the Mediterranean and amplified
Cartesian cosmogony. His work Telliamed: or conversations between an Indian
philosopher and a French missionary did not appear until 1748, though
manuscripts had circulated from 1720. It was an odd work both accepting
mermaids and reporting careful observation on marine deposition. Our main
interest is that the author reckoned the earth to be over two billion years
old and according to Albritton the work acted as a leaven among 18th century
geologists.
Buffon
Buffon, born as Georges-Louis Leclerc (1707-88) was the Keeper of the Jardin
de Roi in Paris and in 1749 published the first volumes of Histoire
Naturelle, but by his death in had published only 35 of the projected 50
volumes. His work was widely available in English. His classification of the
natural world is of no concern to us, but his discussion of Whiston, Burnet
and Woodward in the first volume of his Natural History is. He had little
time for these Theories of the Earth and said, 'I reject these vain
speculations.' However according to Roger, his biographer, Buffon borrowed
more from Whiston than he was willing to admit. It also shows that the
Theorists' longer timescale was wellknown on the continent. Buffon also
carried out experiments on the cooling of red-hot globes of iron and then
applied his findings to the cooling of a globe the size of the earth and
estimated that the age of the earth to be about 75,000 years. Though vastly
greater than 4000 BC, it was not drastically different from British writers
in the previous century and gave some experimental data to support them. In
unpublished manuscripts Buffon reckoned the earth to be 3 million years old.
In 1751 he was censured by the theologians at the Sorbonne and responded by
claiming that the first verse of Genesis should read; "In the beginning God
created the materials of the heavens and the earth". This, in fact, is
similar to the ideas of the initial creation of chaos, which was so widely
held - at least by Protestants in Britain and Immanuel Kant.
Chaos and Time
Buffon went further than his contemporaries on the duration of time but the
consensus of a Chaotic existence of matter in the early phases of the
creation found its way into 18th century poetry. One was Erasmus Darwin
(1731-1802), whose early attempt of putting forward a theory of evolution
was in rhyming couplets. If Buffon is a forerunner of Charles Darwin,
Erasmus Darwin is doubly so. Charles wrote of his grandfather, 'he fully
believed in God as Creator of the universe.' and Erasmus's fin de siecle
poems on evolution, considered by Horace Walpole as "sublime", reflect
current understandings of Creation and Chaos,
'---- Let there be light!' proclaimed the Almighty Lord.
Astonished Chaos heard the potent word:-
Through all his realms the kindling Ether runs,
And the mass starts into a million suns;'
The views of Erasmus Darwin on the age of the earth are similar to
Christians of the time. Take William Williams (1717- 1791), who wrote the
hymn Guide me O thou great redeemer. In 1756 he wrote Golwg ar Deymas Crist
(A View of Christ's Kingdom) an epic poem answering the Deists. Chapter II
of his epic poem is an account of Creation. There were two creations: the
creation of the basic materials - Chaos - and the creation of the universe
with those materials, all of which God accomplished 'in one hundred and
forty four hours', as in Genesis. Though the Re-creation took 144 hours,
Pantycelyn gives no indication how long Chaos had existed. Most other
religious writers held similar views and only a minority espoused a young
earth. At the end of the 18th century they also sang about it as in Joseph
Haydn's oratorio The Creation, with the orchestral introduction on The Chaos
followed by the aria 'And a new created world sprung up at God's command'.
The libretto of The Creation dates from England in about 1750. An unknown
poet took Milton's ideas in Paradise Lost and wrote it for Handel. In 1792
Haydn obtained a copy while in England and put it to music on returning to
Austria.
Many poets incorporated Chaos when versifying on Creation or related
matters. The ubiquity of Chaos is evidenced by the Black poet Phillis
Wheatly's Thoughts on the Works of Providence;
That called creation from eternal night.
'Let there be light,' He said: and from his profound
Old Chaos heard
Wheatley was a slave born in Africa who was purchased and treated as one of
the family by John Wheatley of Boston. The Wheatleys, slave-owners and
slave, moved in Evangelical circles and are more properly considered in
respect of abolitionism, but this sheds light on how the concept of Chaos
and thus of the duration of time was widely held. Sadly Phillis died in
poverty at the age of 31 in 1784.
Hutchinsonian Literalism
Very different are the clerical scientists John Hutchinson (1674-1737) and
his disciple Alexander Catcott (1725-79). In 1748 Hutchinson wrote Moses'
Principia to oppose Newton. Both lay great store on Genesis and sought to
correct the "errors" of Newtonianism. Far less is made of the Chaos than in
the Theories and Hutchinson seems not to hold that the period of chaos or
tohu va bohu was of any significant duration. In 1868 his disciple Catcott
wrote his Treatise on the Deluge which implied that Chaos was of short
duration. The Hutchinsonian ideas were held by some until the early 19th
century and the last Hutchinsonian scientist seems to have been the
entomologist William Kirby (1759-1850), who argued for a Six-Day creation in
his Bridgewater Treatise. It would be fair to see Hutchinsonianism as a
biblicist reaction to the prevalent Newtonianism.
For the first three-quarters of the century there was no consensus on the
duration of time. What the uneducated believed no one can say with certainty
but the case of Phillis Wheatley should caution against assuming a mere six
thousand years as only the literate have left any evidence. A minority did
take the Bible literally and adhere to an Ussher chronology,
but most Christians, whether evangelical or not, stretched matters with an
indefinite chaos with humanity limited to 6,000 years. It is difficult to
decide whether the lines of William Cowper (1731-1800), an evangelical poet,
who also wrote a poem of appreciation to the botanical poet, Erasmus Darwin,
reflect a concern for geology or not,
Some drill and bore
The solid earth, and from the strata there
Extract a register, by which we learn
That he who made it, and reveal'd its date
To Moses, was mistaken in its age.
William Cowper "The Task"
The Discovery of Deep Time.
Until the end of the 18th Century the vastness of time was little
understood. Though the priority for the discovery of Deep Time is often
assigned to James Hutton (1726-97), the Scottish physician and scientist,
the "discovery" was also made by several scientists in Europe in the last
two decades of the 18th century; the Genevan polymath and mountaineer Henri
de Saussure (1740-99) in the Alps near Chamonix in 1778, the much-maligned
German mineralogist Gottlieb Werner (1749-1817), the Parisian
palaeontologists Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) and Alexander Brogniart and in
England, the Canal engineer William Smith (1769-1839) working near Bath.
None should be given all the credit. However by 1800 the age of the earth
was known to be millions of years.
Bound up with this was the development of the use of fossils to determine
stratigraphy and the historical order of rocks. Before long the succession
of life was known with the attendant fact of extinction. The stratigraphic
column was slowly worked out and was the main task of geologists until
mid-century and slowly the familiar sequence of Cambrian, Ordovician, etc.
was worked out.
Yet no precise figure could be given to the age of the earth; de Saussure
thought the earth to be very old, his compatriot J.A.de Luc (1727-1817)
thought it to be tens of thousands, yet in the 1780s AbbÈ Soulavie was
denounced for impiety by fellow AbbÈ Barruel for allegedly giving an
estimate of 356,913,770 years. By 1820 the eccentric British
clerical-geologist William Buckland (1784-1856) was reckoning "millions of
millions" of years. There was no concerted attack by the church as most
educated Christians happily accepted geologists findings, which was not
surprising as many were clergy. Prominent at the end of the 18th century
were John Playfair (1748-1819) of Edinburgh and Joseph Townsend (1739-1816)
of Bath, who publicised the work of Hutton and Smith respectively. Some
churchmen did oppose geology, but they were always a small minority.
Christian Accommodation
At the beginning of the 19th Century many Christian or nominally Christian,
writers modified the consensus of the Theorists. The sequence based on
Genesis One to Eleven of the initial creation of Chaos, re-ordering Creation
in Six Days with man being created in about 4000BC and then the Deluge
evolved into a vastly extended Chaos to allow for the vast time of geology
and a multiplication of Deluges. Theologians quietly slipped geology into
the Chaos. The first theologian seems to have been Thomas Chalmers
(1780-1847) at St Andrews in the winter of 1802. In 1816 the future
Archbishop of Canterbury, John Bird Sumner (1780-1862) published similar
ideas in A Treatise on the Records of Creation. Both Chalmers and Sumner
were Evangelicals - of an intellectual bent. This harmonisation of geology
and Genesis was widely accepted and prevented any major conflict, but from
1820 to 1850 a minority tried to dismiss geology and insist on a Six-Day
Creation. Their strongest opponents were the clerical geologists and their
supporters.
From about 1810 the main concern of English geologists was simply to work
out the stratigraphic order of rocks before asking more philosophical
questions. Most geologists accepted some kind of multiple Catastrophism with
Noah's Deluge as the last of these, and were known as Diluvialists. In the
1820s some geologists, notably Charles Lyell (1797-1875), rejected
Catastrophism and suggested a more gradual Uniformitarianism. Thus meetings
of the Geological Society of London were often fiery debates between the
Fluvialists led by Lyell and the Diluvialists led by the Rev W.D.Conybeare
(1787-1857), when no holds were barred. These were great fun as were the
associated dinner parties where the port flowed freely. The debates are
often presented as if it were Lyell who introduced notions of a great age.
He did not as all of the "Conybeare Sect" (as Lyell called his friends)
accepted vast geological ages. Some of the humour may be seen in Henry De la
Beche's watercolour cartoon lampooning Lyell's "piddling" geology. De la
Beche (1796-1855) was the first director of the British Geological Survey.
However the result of Uniformitarianism was that the Deluge was no longer
seen as geologically significant or as the last of many Catastrophes, but
many geologists were not entirely convinced of Lyell's Uniformitarianism.
Lyell scarcely affected opinions on the age of the earth.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen J. Krogh" <panterragroup@mindspring.com>
To: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, July 03, 2002 7:56 PM
Subject: History of 6000 Year old creation
>
> I am looking for references for how old is the concept of the 6000 yr old
> earth or creation. I know this was discussed in earlier posts but am
unable
> to find them. Thanks.
>
>
> Stephen J. Krogh, P.G.
> The PanTerra Group
> http://panterragroup.home.mindspring.com
>
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