If, in the year AD 1600, you had asked an educated European how old the planet Earth was and to recount its history he would have said that it was about 6000 years old and that its ancient history was given by the biblical account in Genesis.
If you asked the same question of an educated European in AD 1900 you would have received a quite different answer. He would have answered that the Earth was ancient, that there had not been a Noachian flood, and that the species of life had not been fixed over the history of Earth. In short, Genesis was an allegory and not literal history.
The story of this great change in the conception of the history of Earth is not a simple one. The chronicle of this great change can be broken into five periods;
The pre-scientific period before AD 1600. In the pre-scientific era the Biblical account and the speculations of the Greek philosophers were accepted without great question.
The era of speculative cosmogonies ran from AD 1600-1700. In this period a number of comprehensive cosmogonies were proposed. These were long on armchair speculation and short on substantive supporting evidence. These cosmogonies were part of the new emphasis of science in seeking rational explanations of the features of the world.
The disestablishment of Genesis ran from AD 1700-1780. This period was marked by a great deal of field geology rather than grand cosmogonies. It became clear that there had been significant changes in the Earth's topography over time and that these changes could neither be accounted for by natural processes operating during the brief nor by the postulated Noachian flood. Notable observations included:
Studies of strata suggested that they were laid down by natural processes in which the sea and land had changed places several times.
Studies of earthquakes and volcanoes showed that the surface crust is subject to massive natural transformation.
Observation of rain, wind, water erosion, and sea erosion in action showed that they were forces capable of reducing mountains and creating valleys.
The catastrophist-uniformitarian debate ran from about 1780-1850. By the end of the 18'th century it was clear that the Earth had a long and varied history. Interest in major cosmogony was revived. The major debate was between the catastrophists, e.g., Cuvier, who held that the history of Earth was dominated by major catastrophic revolutions and the uniformitarians, e.g. Hutton and Lyell, who held that the history of Earth was dominated by slow relatively uniform changes in an Earth with a static over all history. During the early part of this period there was a considerable amount of activity by scriptural geologists who attempted to reconcile Genesis and geology. The efforts of the scriptural geologists failed signally; by 1830 scriptural geology was a dead issue in Science.
The modern period runs from AD 1850 to the present. The great debate was won by the uniformitarians, so much so that the degree of gradualism was overstated and the importance of catastrophes was unduly minimized. The modern period has been marked by an enormous expansion of the detailed knowledge of the geological history of the Earth and the processes that have acted during that history.
Many authors choose to present the history of a complex subject by breaking it up into major threads and following the history of each thread separately. I have chosen instead to provide a chronology of significant works and their authors with a view to providing a sense of how perspectives on Geology changed over time. The selections and comments here are not a complete exposition of the works of the authors mentioned; rather they were chosen to illustrate and exemplify changing perspectives over time.
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1510 Leonardo Da Vinci: Selections from the Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci. In his notebooks Da Vinci ponders fossil seashells and concludes that they could not have been laid down by the Noachian flood. He wrote:
"If the Deluge had carried the shells for distances of three and four hundred miles from the sea it would have carried them mixed with various other natural objects all heaped up together; but even at such distances from the sea we see the oysters all together and also the shellfish and the cuttlefish and all the other shells which congregate together, found all together dead; and the solitary shells are found apart from one another as we see them every day on the sea-shores.
"And we find oysters together in very large families, among which some may be seen with their shells still joined together, indicating that they were left there by the sea and that they were still living when the strait of Gibraltar was cut through. In the mountains of Parma and Piacenza multitudes of shells and corals with holes may be seen still sticking to the rocks..."
1594 Loys le Roy: Of the interchangeable course or variety of things in the Whole world. Le Roy accepted that land and sea could change places and that mountains could be reduced to plains and vice versa. Le Roy was vague about actual mechanisms. He can be considered as a very early uniformitarian.
1625 Nathaniel Carpenter: Geography delineated forth in two Bookes In this early work Carpenter argued that the Flood could not have been the major agent of geological change,
1634 Simon Stevin: Second Book of Geology. Stevin followed up Le Roy with arguments that wind and water sufficed as primary agents.
1637 Rene Descartes: Discours de la Methode. Descartes constructed a history of the Earth which was quite influential; it was the starting point for many later cosmogonies. Some of the main points of his system were that the Earth formed as a fiery ball, that when it cooled a crust formed over the abyssal waters, and that this crust collapsed, releasing massive volumes of water.
1640 James Ussher: A number of writers calculated the date of creation, using the Biblical chonologies, astronomical records, and historical chronologies. Of these, Ussher's date of 4004 BC is the most famous. Other dates include 3928 BC (John Lightfoot, AD 1644) and 5529 BC (Theophilus of Antioch. AD 169).
1669 Nicholas Steno: The Produmus. Steno did the basic analysis of how fossils got embedded in stone. From his field observations of the Tuscan landscape he concluded that the Flood was important but did not completely explain the observed geology.
1681 Thomas Burnet: Sacred Theory of the Earth. Burnet's famous and widely read book reworked Descartes's speculations to fit the biblical account. In his conception the antediluvian Earth was a smooth ovoid. Over time the surface dried out and the abyssal waters were heated. Eventually the surface cracked, releasing the abyssal waters in the Noachian flood.
1691 John Ray: The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation. Ray reworked Burnet's cosmogony. One of the notable features of Ray's works was the thought he put into possible sources for the waters of the flood. Ray accepted that there had been continuous interchange between land and sea.
1693 Baron Leibnitz: Protogea. Leibnitz reworked Descartes's cosmogony. Protogea was published much later in 1749.
1695 John Woodward: An essay toward a Natural History of the Earth. Woodward came down fairly strongly for the view that the flood was an act of God that could not be accounted for by normal physical processes. He also postulated hydrological sorting to account for the ordering of fossils.
1696 William Whiston: A new theory of the Earth.... Whiston added comets to Burnet's cosmogony as the source of the waters of the flood.
1705 Robert Hooke: Lectures and Discourse of Earthquakes and Subterranean Eruptions. Hooke believed that the fossils were the remains of extinct species and could not be accounted for by the Flood.
"Asking himself how the present areas of land came to be dry, he answers 'it could be from the Flood of Noah, since the duration of that which was but about two hundred natural days, or half a year could not afford time enough for the production and perfection of so many and so great and full grown shells, as these which are so found do testify; besides the quantity and thickness of the beds of sand with which they are many times found mixed, do argue that there must needs be a much longer time of seas residence of the seas above same, than so short a space can afford."
1748 Benoit de Maillet: Telliamed, or Conversations between an Indian Philosopher and a French Missionary on the Diminution of the Sea. Using Descartes's cosmology, the assumption that the earth was once entirely flooded, and the observation that the sea level was dropping three inches per century near his home, he calculated the age of the earth to be greater than 2 billion years.
1771 Peter Pallas: Observation sur la Formation des Montagnards.... Pallas made extensive observations of Russian mountains. He observed the results of processes that acted on mountains, e.g. weathering, erosion, deposition, and the fracturing and upheaval of strata. He argued for occasional catastrophic events as an origin for mountain building.
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1820 William Buckland: Vindiciae Geologicae. In 1820 Buckland was a scriptural geologist. Thus he wrote:
Again the grand fact of an universal deluge at no very remote period is proved on grounds so decisive and incontrovertible, that, had we never heard of such an event from Scripture, or any other authority, Geology of itself must have called in the assistance of some such catastrophe, to explain the phenomena of diluvian action which are universally presented to us, and which are unintelligible without recourse to a deluge exerting its ravages at a period not more ancient than that announced in the book of Genesis.
