Hi Michael
Your comment about Buffon is tantalising. I was under the impression ne was
close to being a lapsed catholic with a near deathbed revival. can you tell us
more?
Jon
Michael Roberts wrote:
> 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 Abb» Soulavie was
> denounced for impiety by fellow Abb» 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
> >
-- "It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the earth as a pale crescent dwindling against the stars, until at last they look for it in vain".Arthur C. Clarke
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