Few can have missed everything going on about sex and gender, with people like Lord Winston insisting that you cannot change sex.
Hear Rev Ian Paul gives a response to a recent statement from the Roman Catholic bishops of England and Wales and regrets the Church of England didn’t do something similar.
In case you wonder where I stand, I am in very close agreement with both.
Source: Gender identity and the Christian vision of humanity | Psephizo
It is incredible that after over six decades Young Earth Creationists (YEC) are still arguing for an earth of a few thousand years old and that evolution has not happened.
At first YEC seems very plausible and sciency, with a plethora of quotations from scientists to support their complete rejection of geology and evolution.
One common approach on social media is to use a meme, which apparently plausible (at times) but apparently designed to mislead . This is one of the more banal ones.
Or this
Others can seem quite plausible, especially if one is not au fait with science. However to any familiar with the science they are feeble and misleading as Dr Joel Duff explains on recent meme which claims that geckos have not evolved in 50 million years.
Geckos are noisy beasts and when in India we could here them on our bunglaow calling “gecko, gecko”!!!
Anyway far better is to listen to and read Joel on the subject
An interesting blog about Tony Sewell’s Black Success—The Surprising Truth by Tony Sewell.
Sewell was recently chair of the UK’s government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, the recommendations which are now the foundations of the government’s policy on tackling racial inequalities. He goes against many of the DEI ideas!!
I often “nick” blogs from Ian Paul (though he did not write this one) as they so often give an excellent perspective and ruffles the odd feather!
Source: What makes for Black Success in Britain today? | Psephizo
Well, surely only Creationists believe that James Ussher got it right today? That is right, but he had also got it wrong in 1656 and went against the traditional teaching of the church – and by that I mean the Western Churches, both catholic and protestant.
So often we are told all Christians believed that God created everything in about 4000BC, until the late 18th century and later when the naughty James Hutton and Charles Lyell started arguing for a very ancient earth. This can be seen in two ways; either the church was beguiled by those wicked geologists into destroying Genesis, or that that Hutton and Lyell liberated people from believing biblical fantasies.
Recently the book On the Edge of Eternity by Ivano Dal Prete of Yale has rather scuppered that view and taken the ground away from Creationists and afficionados of the conflict thesis of science and religion
Ivano Dal Prate; Oxford University Press , New York 2022
The blurb on Amazon says;
It is commonly assumed that the creation story of Genesis and its chronology were the only narratives openly available in medieval and early modern Europe and that the discovery of geological time in the eighteenth century came as a momentous breakthrough that shook the faith in the historical accuracy of the Bible. Historians of science, mainstream geologists, and Young Earth creationists alike all share the assumption that the notion of an ancient Earth was highly heterodox in the pre-modern era. The old age of the world is regarded as the offspring of a secularized science.
In this book, Ivano Dal Prete radically revises the commonplace history of deep time in Western culture. He argues that the chronology of the Bible always coexisted with alternative approaches that placed the origin of the Earth into a far, undetermined (or even eternal) past. From the late Middle Ages, these notions spread freely not only in universities and among the learned, but even in popular works of meteorology, geology, literature, and art that made them easily accessible to a vernacular and scientifically illiterate public. Religious authorities did not regard these notions as particularly problematic, let alone heretical. Neither the authors nor their numerous readers thought that holding such views was incompatible with their Christian faith. While the appeal of theories centered on the biblical Flood and on a young Earth gained popularity over the course of the seventeenth century, their more secular alternatives remained vital and debated. Enlightenment thinkers, however, created a myth of a Christian tradition that uniformly rejected the antiquity of the world, as opposed to a new secular science ready to welcome it. Largely unchallenged for almost three centuries, that account solidified over time into a still dominant truism.
Based on a wealth of mostly unexplored sources, On the Edge of Eternity offers an original and nuanced account of the history of deep time that illuminates the relationship between the history of science and Christianity in the medieval and early modern periods, with lasting implications for Western society.
Dal Prete is not quite the first to do this and even I have had a few attempts!! But despite a strongly Italian bias he makes a good case. To affirm his non-anglo-centricity poor Archbishop Ussher doesn’t even get a mention and his date of 4004BC is nowhere to be found. He makes a good case but it needs to be extended to anglophones as well.
The book is subtitled The antiquity of the earth in Medieval and Early Modern Europe but its sweep is wider. Its thesis is bold. It argues that in Western Europe Deep Time was common in the early Catholic Church and thus not introduced in the 18th century. It carefully garners the evidence focussing on the Medieval Church in the West and then after 1500 mostly from northern Italy. The rest of Europe is mentioned in passing. The book is a dense read but rewarding. Much has been described briefly elsewhere but this focusses on this one issue.
Its thesis is that Deep Time was not discovered in the 18th century but goes back fifteen centuries. Simplistic views based on the Conflict Thesis are hammered as the author uses a vast amount of documented evidence from the Mediaeval Church and mostly northern Italy. The main text is 214 pages and the notes 83, and it adopts a chronological sequence.
The first two chapters deal with medieval church and their flexibility on the antiquity of the earth. At one end the Chronologists, who were more literalist, insisted that the earth was created in 4000BC or 5300 BC depending whether they followed the Hebrew or Greek Old Testament. At the other end some insisted that the earth was eternal until that was proscribed in 1215 at the Fifth Lateran Council with a range of ideas in-between these extremes.
There were four main views;
Deep Time with eternalism – proscribed in 1215 but remained outside official belief. ;
Deep Time with a point of creation and tending to allegorical Biblical interpretation. There was no precision as to time, beyond the fact that the earth was ancient, and that it had undergone many changes in its long existence and there had been lots of flood.
“Shallow Time” of the Chronologists, who were more literal and historical. These take the chronologies of the Old Testament. As most Christians in Europe tended to use the Greek translation of the Old Testament (LXX), they normally took creation as occurring inc5300BC. Probably the first was probably Ad Autolycum by Theophilus of Antioch in the second century, followed by Constantine’s favourite bishop, Eusebius, in the early 4th century and a little later Jerome. Thus they opted for 5300BC give or take. The Hebrew texts points to 4000BC and when the Venerable Bede argued for creation in c4000BC, some monks complained to the local bishop about Bede’s heresy. (There have always been prigs complaining to bishops about clergy.)
and lastly, but very significant, Shallow Time with Chaos. These looked not only to the Bible, but also Latin writers and after 1200 Greek as well. These included Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pliny’s Natural History (Pliny never got round to writing up his observations on the eruption of Vesuvius.) Seneca and latterly Plato. Ovid was the most widely read and the first part talks about the disorganised chaos which was later re-ordered. This chimed in with Genesis chapter one vs 2 with the initial creation being “a formless void”.It gave a longer timeframe than the chronologists, resulting in the Western Church being open to Deep Time. [The last view has often been ignored but is was very widely held, not only in the Medieaval Church but also after reformation and up to 1860. After that it was gently dropped but taken up by ultra-evangelicals with their “Gap Theory”, a thoroughly degenerate version of an old and respected understanding. Dal Prate scarecly touches on this but it was held by many post Reformation commentators – Catholic and Protestant, and even by many poets including Stephen Spencer and Milton.
It comes out in Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, with the orchestral introduction The Representation of Chaos and then the re-ordering of chaos with the beautiful aria “a new created world sprung up”. Needless to say many early British geologists adopted it to allow for geological time, most notably William Buckland in 1818. But that is another story needing telling.
All these ideas spread beyond the church as is discussed in the chapter Vernacular Earths 1250-1500. The merchants of Tuscany were well-read and interested in the structure of the earth and hence deep time spread beyond the church. Da Vinci was born into this environment. This chapter gives a flavour of ideas of time and Natural philosophy in a wider educated culture.
The Reformation disrupted the church in 1517. One result was a greater emphasis on a literal Biblical interpretation by Protestant and Catholic alike and thus a shorter timescale for earth. The Jesuits insisted on a short chronology. Biblical chronologies flourished, including the Calvinist Scaliger, and (not mentioned) Ussher. Even so the multiplicity of older views did not disappear, but were diminished, or held privately within and without the churches only to resurface. Despite the bias to biblical literalism, many theologians followed my Shallow Time with Chaos and that is another story needing telling.
As Prete emphasises during the Middle Ages many accepted multiple deluges with Noah’s the last. That changed with rise of diluvialism after 1650, when only the Noachian Deluge was accepted influencing geological thought. Prete looks wider than Italy on diluvialism and discusses both French and British exponents. The most influent Briton throughout Europe was Woodward who was also the most literal. Other theorists of the earth opted for shallow time with chaos thus allowing geological time to slowly creep in.
The chapters on the early church up to diluvialism give a good perspective but does not explain the religious aspects which is necessary to fully understand his argument. Hence some of my explanatory comments.. The chapter entitled The INVENTION of the History of Deep Time is more how the history of Deep Time was rewritten by the philosophes claiming that Deep Time was put forward to oppose the “young earth” orthodox churches, and then used as an argument against religion. It is not convincing, as during the 1700s more savants, Christian or not, adopted Deep Time. Even Buffon tended to value the scenario of Genesis One, but allowed far more time that 144 hours, with his seven epochs. This is a good example of the Day-Age interpretation
The RC priest Fr Needham had a similar outlook.The conflict was not Deep Time versus Shallow Time, but an eternal earth versus an oldish one, epitomised by Hutton and de Luc. Some competent geologists were still Young Earth up to 1800 as were Smith and Parkinson, but don’t tell anyone!.
The chapter Political Fossils gives some insights into controversies in Venice and Verona, noting they may not be “an indicator of larger trends”. His mention of Chateaubriand (1768-1848) is tantalising brief. Like Gosse years later, Chateaubriand claimed that the earth was created with an appearance of history. Prete’s claim that a young earth was identified with the tradition of Christian Europe is questionable, particularly for Britain. His concluding chapter brings the arguments up to the present time, but is rather disjointed.
To conclude; this book gives an instructive and well-evidenced thesis up to 1650, which, despite caveats, I find convincing. It gives some excellent insights how the Western Church considered (deep) time and belief. However it is as tough to read as it is stimulating and not for bedtime reading.
Hutton did not invent Deep Time from the depths of his unbelief, and nor was the church locked into a creation in 4004BC.
A very useful summary of the Cass Report on controversies over transgender issues in the NHS, by Ian Paul, a fellow Anglican priest.
I t does not make for happy reading
Source: The Cass report, children, and the Church of England | Psephizo
More on the £1 billion fund for slavery reparations from the Church of England, which has totally gone over the top.
It is often overlooked that after 1834 when slavery in British territories was stopped, that the British government got the Royal Navy to stop the trade. The forgotten West Africa Squadron.
The terrible Brits then went to East Africa and stopped the trade there which was centred on Zanzibar.
A recent article in the church Times questions the basis and claims and whether the church made any money out of it; “The irony is that the managers of the Church’s 18th- century “Bounty” (fund) avoided this abhorrent trade and did not profit from it.”
https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2024/22-march/comment/opinion/slavery-did-not-benefit-bounty
Anyway here is the article or blog, which takes a hard look at the issues involved.
It is yet another wayward idea from the Church of England which will benefit no one.
Source: ‘The Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice’: a discussion | Psephizo
Yes, I am not joking! People of all faiths and none have wondered and written on how old the earth is for three thousand years.
However the geological understanding of the strata in a particular order only goes back 250 years and then our order Cambrian Ordovician etc was worked out by 1850. Here is an early cross-section from Snowdon to London
In 1963 I actually went from the top of Snowdon to south of the Thames under my own steam. I had climbed Snowdon, leaving my bike at the bottom. When I descended I cycled the 300 miles home. So I traversed all of this geological section!
For nearly two thousand years Christians have tried to tie ideas of ages that into the Bible, which if we take Genesis literally means the earth is only a few thousand years old. But we are often told that all Christians believed in a young earth until godless geologists like Hutton and Lyell came along. .
This podcast looks into most of these issues.
First, most Christians have never believed that the earth is only a few thousand years young.
Secondly, they have taken many different views. Some argued the earth was eternal but that got bopped down in 1215. Some insisted the earth was created in about 4000BC or 5500BC, depending whether they preferred the Hebrew or Greek text. Some thought it was extremely old and others just old. Apart from the first all held their views agreed with the Bible.
To summarise the alternatives were;
All these were common before the Reformation after which both Protestant and Catholic tended to adopt shallow time , but the other ideas persists and came to the fore with geology in the 18th century.
It is simply wrong to say the church (which one) thought the earth was a few thousand years old until Hutton and Lyell came along about 200 years ago. That is simply not true and further neither was out to destroy the Christian faith.
Christians were leading lights among early geologists.
Here is a map produced in 1821 by Rev Prof John Henslow from Cambridge. It is an incredibly good map and shows great geological skill. As I have researched Henslow I have used it in the field along with newer maps
And now here is Rev William Buckland of Oxford inspecting a roche moutonnee at Rhyd Ddu in Snowdonia in October 1841. As well as discovering megalasuarus he also introduced the idea of the Ice Age to Britain.
Here is a photo of it with the Nantlle Ridge behind. It is also the start of the Rhyd Ddu path up Snowdon which I climbed in 2011 – the 60th anniversary of my first ascent of Snowdon
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
He was a good devout theologian too and followed the “Chaos in the Shallow End ” view which was the dominant view 200 years ago.
And here is Augustine criticising those silly Christians who try to chuck out good science
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And now here is the podcast on the age of the earth. It was a bit of a rush getting through so much in so short a time!!
Recently I was asked to deal with this for a Podcast with Doubts Aloud
And here it is
Show Notes We are excited to have guest Rev Michael Roberts with us, he’s an Oxford geologist who subsequently became an Anglican vicar. He is extremely knowledgeable on the history of geology and the age of the earth in science, Christian academic thought, theology and the modern Young Earth movement. Did you know that Darwin was a geologist at the start of his career? Neither did we. Links:Michael’s blog is:
https://michaelroberts4004.wordpress.com/
Michael’s paper “Just before the Beagle”:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17qo3zEeYKZlwL_Y8DpoX3F-35BO4rPPz/view?usp=sharing
His 5 day trip exploring Darwin in Wales
https://www.newscientist.com/tours/retracing-charles-darwins-travels-across-north-wales/?fbclid=IwAR372bjMkHAcr0UU4p6B9KqztYkaOk5bxLH4PUgXRT06Nfo75iuhank-gac
That Ovid book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphoses
That Genesis Flood 1961 book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Genesis_Flood(
The link also mentions the Bernard Ramm book “The Christian View of Science and Scripture” we mentioned.) That irreverent cartoon on Adam and Eve overpopulating the globe due to obedience:
https://www.spreaker.com/episode/episode-74-the-age-of-the-earth-with-rev-michael-roberts–58950631
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A good blog on the recent Church of England of £1 billion pounds for slavery reparations.
It points out the one-sidedness, omissions and perhaps is due to the Church of England swallowing stuff from Black lives Matter.
But I suppose Ian and I will be seen as racist and need to repent of our whiteness.
But then I prefer to stand in the tradition of Wilberforce, the Wedgwoods and others
Source: Should the Church generate a £1 billion fund for slavery reparations? | Psephizo
On 20th February 1824 there was a packed meeting of the Geological society of London at Bedford St Covent Garden when the Rev William Buckland presented the megalosaurus,
effectively the first dinosaur described and his friend the Rev William Conybeare presented Pleisiosaurus which had been discovered by Mary Anning near Lyme Regis.
To those who hold science to conflict with religion this may be a shock and seem impossible, but some of the best English geologists of that era were clergy. Another was Rev Adam Sedgwick of Cambridge, but he wasn’t very good on fossils and seemed to prefer rocks older than the Jurassic. Though Conybeare and pleisiosaurus stole the show that night I will focus on Buckland.
On 20 the February 2024 the history group of the Geol Soc staged a re-enactment with an entry fee of 24 guineas. Mary Anning gate-crashed the meeting.
The meeting was very significant as it showed how much was known about the fauna of the Jurassic and how it was all coming to be known, marking the rapid flowering of geology and palaeontology as a science. It had only been a matter of years that such dramatic fossils had been coming to light with Mary Anning being one of the most important collectors. She also had a good geological understanding and was highly respected by the geologists.
It still comes a surprise to many how significant clergy geologists were as the popular view is that they would believe that the earth was created in 4004BC and thus the Deep Time of geology was atheistic balderdash. Geology had attracted all kinds of people with all kinds of belief to its fold (or basin). In fact Simon Winchester in his book of William Smith suggested the risks faced by any “radically inclined scientists, who were bold enough to challenge both the dogma and the law, the clerics and the courts.” There is not a shred of evidence for this and the only opposition came from a handful of misguided clerics.
It is not my purpose to consider the strictly geological aspects of these finds but consider how Buckland as a Christian and clergyman saw the relationship between his science and his Christian faith in the years from 1810 to 1845 when he went to be Dean of Westminster. He went to Oxford in 1801 to read classics but also went to lectures on mineralogy and took an interest in geology. He was priested in 1809 and carried out geological research from about that time. He was a don at Corpus Christi but was appointed to a Canonry at Christchurch in 1825 when he married Mary Morland, a geologist in her own right. In 1818 he was appointed Reader in Geology at about the same time as some Anglican clergy were beginning to objected to geology with its vast ages which to them undermined the Christian faith. Over the next few decades he sought to answer their objections. In 1819 he gave his inaugural lecture with a pertinent title as it was aimed at the naysayers, who probably made more noise than their numbers justified.
Yes, he wanted to vindicate geology to the minority of ecclesiastical naysayers, who included Nares the professor of history at Oxford and Thomas Gisbourne, who has the distinction of being the last patient Dr Erasmus Darwin saw. The naysayers insisted that the creation week of Genesis was a mere 144 hours and attempted to demonstrate that theirs was the orthodox and traditional position of the church. The little date of 4004BC in many bibles tended to support that, but Buckland wouldn’t have anything of it. His lecture is wordy and forthright and gently put the naysayers in their place.
After a long preamble he moved on to the religious aspects and begins by citing Newton, Paley and Woodward before citing the catastrophism of de Luc most effusively, which Lyell would overthrow in a decade. He pointed out how “geology contributes proofs to Natural Theology” and then went to the core of his lecture “Let us now proceed to the second part of our inquiry, and examine in what degree the results of Geological investigations appear to have affected the evidences of revelation, by bringing to notice acts, which may seem at first sight to be inconsistent with the literal interpretation of the Mosaic records.” It is that literal interpretation of Genesis which could cause problems then as now. As a good Diluvialist he claimed that geology supported a universal deluge, even though it only deposited the top thirty feet of strata. I am not sure whether he ever stopped believing it as in the Oxford Museum there is an illegible manuscript claimed that the flood occurred after the Ice Age. To Buckalnd geology supports the biblical ideas of a universal deluge and low antiquity of humans, but there was the vast age of the earth to consider;
If Geology goes further, and shews that the present system of this planet is built on the wreck and ruins of one more ancient, there is nothing in this inconsistent with the Mosaic declaration, that the whole material universe was created in the beginning by the Almighty : and though Moses confines the detail of his history to the preparation of this globe for the reception of the human race, he does not deny the prior existence of another system of things, of which it was quite foreign to his purpose to make mention, as having no reference to the destiny or to the moral conduct of created man.
In other words, we do not go to Genesis One for historical details thus cutting the Gordian knot of literalism, as did Sedgwick some years later. Here citeds three witnesses, John Sumner, later archbishop of Canterbury, Bishop Horsely of St Asaph, who despite being a physicist insisted on a creation week, and the French naturalist Buffon, who in the 1760s reckoned the earth could be millions of years old. As Sumner put it;
According to that history, we are bound to admit, that only “ one general destruction or revolution of the globe has taken “ place since the period of that creation which Moses records, “ and of which Adam and Eve were the first inhabitants. The “ certainty of one event of that kind would appear from the discoveries of geologers (sic), even if it were not declared by the sacred “ historian. But we are not called upon to deny the possible existence of previous worlds , from the wreck of which our globe “ was organized, and the ruins of which are now furnishing matter to our curiosity. The belief of their existence is indeed consistent with rational probability, and somewhat confirmed by “ the discoveries of Astronomy, as to the plurality of worlds ”
This may seem strange from an evangelical theologian, but his biblical interpretation here goes back to the early church. That becomes clearer as Buckland explained it a few pages later (p31-2);
A third hypothesis may be suggested, which supposes the word “ beginning” as applied by Moses in the first verse of the Book of Genesis, to express an undefined period of time which was antecedent to the last great change that affected the surface of the earth, and to the creation of its present animal and vegetable inhabitants ; during which period a long series of operations and revolutions may have been going on, which, as they are wholly unconnected with the history of the human race, are passed over in silence by the sacred historian, whose only concern with them was barely to state, that the matter of the universe is not eternal and self-existent, but was originally created by the power of the Almighty.
Buckland was playing to his audience of Oxford dons, most of whom were ordained. They would have known exactly what he meant and that he was demonstrating that he was no radical full of new ideas, but a sound theologian following traditional teaching.
I would suggest most would miss this today due to the common belief that Christians believed that the earth was created in 4004BC until Lyell and Hutton upset the apple-cart! A significant number, including the clergy, believed just that , but belief in a young earth of Ussher, Bede, Jerome and Theophilus of Antioch was but one interpretation of several. Until the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 some thought the earth was eternal, but the council insisted that the earth was created from nothing at a certain unspecified time. But there was another widely-held belief among Western Christians, living under Roman jurisdiction and reading Latin but rarely Greek. Despite the discredited myth of the Dark Ages, Western Christians were deeply read both in theology and almost every other subject. So not only did they read the church fathers (and the Vulgate!) and for the materials and history of the earth they went to Roman writers; Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (he was unable to include an account of the eruption of Vesuvius) and Seneca’s Natural Questions. Thus when scholars, clergy or lay, professional or not, wrote on the natural world they garnered their information from all sources; biblical, theologians, natural historians and “scientists” and thus a work on creation would not only look to Genesis but to various scholars whether contemporary, medieaval or Roman. Ovid was one of the most widely read and his Metamorphoses (here translated by Dryden) begins with creation.
The “rude and undigested mass” (line 10) was seen as the same as the “formless void and darkness” of Genesis ch1 vs2 or in the Vulgate “Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi: et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas.” It was a small jump to reckon Ovid and Moses were describing the same thing and thus the 6 days of Genesis one were “stretched” for the duration of the Chaos which was “a formless void” or “inanis et vacua” and of indefinite length. The many, and many there were, who held this did not accept creation is six days but consider creation to have taken place over an unspecified time. This came out in many Reformation/Renaissance works whether poetry or theology or even Leonardo da Vinci, and even in Ussher’s Annales but he limited the time for chaos to half a day!! This carried on through the next two centuries and went rapidly into decline by 1850. So Buckland was no radical.
Buckland, following the Scot Thomas Chalmers, took one further step and claimed that this allowed for all geological time before humans appeared. Geology was the “rude and undigested mass” of Ovid.
He presented a similar argument in Chapter 2 of his Bridgewater Treatise
I have stated my opinion in [in Vind Geoll] favour of the hypothesis, ” which supposes the word ‘beginning,’ as applied by Moses in the first verse of the book of Genesis, to express an undefined period of time; which was antecedent to the last great change that affected the surface of the earth, and to the creation of its present animal and vegetable inhabitants; during which period a long series of operations and revolutions may have been going on; which, as they are wholly unconnected with the history of the human race, are passed over in silence by the sacred historian, whose only concern with them was barely to state, that the matter of the universe is not eternal and self-existent, but was originally created by the power of the Almighty.”
I have great satisfaction in finding that the view of this subject, which I have here expressed, and have long entertained, is in perfect accordance with the highly valuable opinion of Dr. Chalmers, recorded in the following passages of his Evidence of the Christian Revelation, chap. vii.: — “Does Moses ever say, that when God created the heavens and the earth he did more, at the time alluded to, than transform them out of previously existing materials? Or does he ever say that there was not an interval of many ages between the first act of creation described in the first verse of the Book of Genesis, and said to have been performed at the beginning, and those more detailed operations, the account of which commences at the second verse, and which are described to us as having been performed in so many days? Or, finally, does he ever make us to understand that the genealogies of man went any farther than to fix the antiquity of the species, and, of consequence, that they left the antiquity of the globe a free subject for the speculation of philosophers?”
Musically a very similar understanding of common views is to be found in Haydn’s Creation, thus Buckland was speaking on familiar territory.
Orchestral Prelude: The Representation of Chaos
Recitative and Chorus
Raphael
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth; and the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
Chorus
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters; and God said: Let there be light;and there was light.
Uriel
And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.
Aria and Chorus
Uriel
Now vanish before the holy beams the gloomy dismal shades of dark; the first of days
appears. Disorder yields to order fair the place. Affrighted fled hell’s spirits black in
throngs; down they sink in the deep of abyss, to endless night.
Chorus
Despairing, cursing rage attends their rapid fall. A new created world springs up at God’s command.
The libretto was originally produced for Handel in the mid 18th century but Haydn acquired it and put it to music. Most significant is the joyful rendering of ” A new created world…” And so after a long series of catastrophes this was God’s final (re)creation preparing the earth for humans. Buckland had demonstrated his traditional orthodoxy!!
However Buckland gave another alternative allowing the days to be of indeterminate length;
A fourth hypothesis is that which follows the opinion previously adopted by many learned and pious men, on grounds very different from those of Geology, that the days of the Mosaic creation are not to be strictly construed as implying the same length of time which is at present occupied by a single revolution of our globe, but Periods of a much longer extent. And Bishop Horsley, while he insists that the day in the Mosaic account could only signify a revolution of the earth round its axis, still adds these remarkable words, which do, in fact, admit the whole of this hypothesis; “That “ this revolution was performed in the same space of time in the “ beginning of the world and now, I could not over-confidently “ affirm.”
Buckland respected this view and it was held by his friend Rev G S Faber, but he clearly preferred the other.
Buckland must be seen as both a geologist and a theologian. His Bridgewater treatise on geology was the best-selling book on geology and read by don and artisan alike. Soon after the publication of his inaugural lecture in 1819 there was a spate of books trying to refute the findings of geologists and insisting on a young earth. Many were by Anglican clergy and all were marked by an invincible ignorance of geology. Buckland was infuriated when Frederick Nolan argued for a young earth in his Bampton Lectures of 1833 – Analogy of Revelation and Science. He was scathing about it in letters as was his wife Mary (no mean geologist herself) as she wrote to Whewell, “Could he (WB) be carried back a century, fire and faggot would have been his fate.” Just a slight exaggeration.
The professor from the newer university was even more scathing as I write here
https://michaelroberts4004.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/how-to-deal-with-victorian-creationists-and-win
These “anti-geologists” (following Hugh Miller’s appellation) were never numerous and contained only one senior cleric – Dean Cockburn of York – who attacked Buckland and other geologists for their bad science. Cockburn wrote rubbish for his own day! Sedgwick was not so gentle with Cockburn! By 1855 the anti-geologists had joined the dinosaurs only to reappear in Lyellian fashion in 1961!
I have already mentioned Buckland’s Bridgewater treatise of 1836 which included both geology and theology.
The most overlooked contribution of Buckland to geology and theology is his sermon on death
The context of the sermon is that over the previous two decades some clergy argued that geology had to be wrong over vast time as there could be no death before the Fall.Many books were published and the controversy crowded the pages of the Christian Observer. Most had little geological knowledge but their numbers included Gisborne, William Kirkby, who wrote one of the Bridgewater treatises and unwittingly paved the way for parasitic wasps to be named Darwin’s wasps this century, Edward Nares, professor of history at Oxford and Dean Cockburn of York.
From the timing, it may have been Cockburn’s diatribe against geology in A letter to Professor Buckland concerning the origins of this world which was published a year before this sermon on 18th February 1838. The letter of twenty three pages was a full frontal attack on Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise. It bears comparison to some of the worst of recent creationism! The anti-geologists both claimed that the earth is but a few thousand years old and because of this no animals died before the Fall and that animals did not die until Adam had his little mal. It was the result of this little mal* that Buckland focussed on in his sermon, that is whether Adam’s fall resulted in animal death as part of God’s punishment over the Fall. Buckland made it clear that the Fall was confined to the human race.
The text for his sermon was Romans v. 12. As by one man sin came into the world, and death by sin, but his main focus was on Romans 8 vs18-23 as that passage was and still is used by today’s creationists to prove that God’s curse extended to poor animals and thus the earth must be young. Today this argument is often used as a slam-dunk against geological time. And so Buckland argues;
Another passage frequently quoted in support of the opinions against which I am contending, is the following, from the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. “ We know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.“ These words, considered apart from the context, may appear susceptible of an application, extending beyond mankind, to other parts of animated nature, and even to things inanimate. But viewed in connexion with the adjacent pas sages, and the train of argument in which they are introduced, the pains and penalties herein specified, appear strictly and exclusively limited to the human race.
The Authorised Version uses the word creature for the Greek ktisis rather than creation except in verse 22 but most modern version use creation i.e the cosmos for all. Citing Col 1 vs 23 and Mark 16 vs15 Buckland concludes that Rom 8 does not speak of creation but humanity. He then argues that the claim that Paul is talking of the cosmos stems from poets especially Milton’s Paradise Lost. Unpacking all of Buckland’s arguments needs a more thorough treatment, but he makes his case and looks back to earleir theologians and included a very conservation evang4elical baptist John Gill who as Buckland cited “Gill remarks upon these passages, “’Tis best of all by the
creature to understand the Gentile world.”
Few New Testament scholars today consider ktisis to be anything other than creation/cosmos, but up to 1850 Buckland’s stance was a common one right across the theological spectrum. Today it is usually not even considered, but as many commentators claim verse 20 refers to the Fall of Genesis 3 – and thus has the implication that there was animal death before the Fall. Yet none, except the most evangelical want to go down that road. The New Testament scholar N T Wright makes very heavy weather of the passage;
Did God subject Creation to pointless futility?
Buckland was writing to the theological issues over geology of his day two hundred years ago and his concerns are still valid today, especially on the sentence of death.
In all this theological entanglement Buckland carried out some very significant geology. He mostly worked on Mesozoic strata and as well as describing megalsaurus, he also found an early Jurassic mammal at Stonesfield quarry – didephus. This gave rise to much controversy, but that is another story.
At the British Association in 1832 he gave an amusing lecture on megatherium.
He was fascinated by caves and the coprolites dropped by the residents and thus gave his 1824 book Reliquiae Diluvianae which is much more than looking for evidence of Noah’s Flood. It is a very serious geological piece of work, though humourists could joke about it scatologically;
In 1838 he and Mary visited Switzerland and met Agassiz, one of the co-discoverers of the Ice Age.Like Darwin he first rejected it but then became a convert and then introduced the theory to Britain. In 1840 he travelled northwards to Scotland with Agassiz and Lyell. Shortly before they arrived at Lancaster they identified a drumlin which indicated the work of ice. (Today I walked over the most southerly drumlin which is close to my house.) Passing through the Lakes they identified glacial cams on the east side of Helvellyn before going to the Parallel Roads of Glen Roy, where they dismembered Darwin’s theories of a rising sea level producing old beach lines. It was seen to be shorelines of a glacial lake like the Marjelensee adjacent to the Aletzsch glacier. That year he returned to Oxford via Newcastle to go geologising with Tom Sopwith, who drew his famous sketch.
As it refers to a rock scratched at Waterloo Bridge it is often thought be of North Wales as that bridge is in Betws y Coed, but the signpost says Alston in the Durham Moors, indicating an autumn 1840 date. My tentative conclusion is that he added the two scratched rocks the following year.
The next year Buckland and Sopwith went to study glaciation in Snowdonia. They started at the lakes at Ellesmere and noted rocks from both Scotland and Wales, indicating two ice sheets from different places. They then continued to Snowdonia in appalling October weather and managed to sort out the main glacial troughs and features of Snowdonia. Sopwith painted another portrait of Buckland at Rhyd Ddu standing on a roche moutonee. The picture has been wrongly used to be of Mary Anning, but all the features are easily recognisable, as my photo shows, with the roche moutonee with y Garn and the Nantlle Ridge behind. I have stood on that roche moutonee and noted the grooves and have climbed Y Garn several times. My son’s 75th birthday present to me was to take me via the Rhyd Ddu path up Snowdon, so I saw this site again.
(My head hides Y Garn!)
Sadly Buckland was lost to geology went he went to be Dean of Westminster in 1845. This was as the Big Stink was welling up and he was a technical advisor on the sewers. On one occasion he gave his typical graphic descriptions of the sewers in the Abbey with Queen Victoria present. There is no record of her reaction but I bet Albert was fascinated.
His last years were marred by mental illness and he died in 1857. I am sure his response to Darwin would have been more positive than Sedgwick’s.
Buckland was one of the great geologists, up with Lyell and Hutton – and Sedgwick and Conybeare. He thought seriously about his faith in relation to geology and his sermon on Romans 8 needs careful study today.
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Today before I completed this I heard the sad news of the death of Patrick Boylan, who had made considerable studies on Buckland. In the 90s when I was researching the discovery of glaciation in wales by Buckland and Darwin I was advised to contact him. He gave me great help and has been a friend and support since. I dedicate this blog to Patrick R.I.P.
Whole book
My chapter is INTELLIGENT DESIGN; SOME GEOLOGICAL, HISTORICAL AND THEOLOGICAL QUESTIONS. and I look at the question of ID, not from a design perspective but over geological time. I consider that the design of Paley fell on the rise of geological time with new life forms appearing at intervals. If we deny evolution then the fossil record can only be explained by God popping back at intervals to create a new model for the next few million years. You can read the whole chapter here;
You can read the whole chapter by opening the link, but here are extracts;
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The Design Argument evokes William Paley walking on a Cumbrian moorland and discovering a watch. In the windswept silence he developed his Watchmaker analogy of an intelligent designer, and thus Intelligent Design may be considered as the restatement of the old argument refuted by Charles Darwin. There are similarities but also important differences between the old Design Arguments of Paley, William Buckland and even John Ray and those of Behe, Dembski and other proponents of Intelligent Design. To make a valid comparison, it is essential to consider the content and context of Design, old and new, the relationship of both to geological time, biological evolution, naturalism (or secondary causes) and a “theological approach” to science. My major concern is the refusal of Design Theorists to take sufficient cognisance of the vastness of geological time. Secondly I show that historically scientists cannot simply be type–cast as “theistic” or “naturalist” as both some design theorists and critics imply. Thirdly I show that Intelligent Design is more an argument from rhetoric than science, and lastly I seek to demonstrate difference between Intelligent Design and the 19th century design arguments and how Intelligent Design is very different from Paley’s.
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The development of the Design Argument in the 18th century culminated in William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) and William Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise in 1836. Paley and Buckland emphasised the perfection of mechanical structures,
The Implication of geological time and the fossil succession for Intelligent Design.
Most concerning to a geologist is the near absence of reference to geological time in studies on Intelligent Design. It is as if the origin of species, whether by direct intervention or by evolution, can be discussed without reference to Deep Time, or to the succession of life. As Nancy Pearcey wrote, ‘For too long, opponents of naturalistic evolution have let themselves be divided and conquered over subsidiary issues like the age of the earth’.[6] Like Pearcey, who is a Young Earth Creationist, most intelligent designers simply ignore issues of age as irrelevant. The issue of the succession of life through the 4.6 billion years of time clearly has an effect on how one will conceive how any life form will have come into being. If the aeons of geological time are correct, and Pearcy, Nelson and Wise consider that to be wrong, then lifeforms have appeared during time and have gradually changed either through an outside force or naturally. If the earth is only 10,000 years old, then there is insufficient time for changes through natural means and thus it is reasonable to hold the abrupt appearance of species so poetically expressed by Milton;
The grassy clods now calved, now half appeared
The tawny lion, pawing to get free
His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds,
And rampant shakes his brinded mane;
Paradise Lost; Book VII, l463-6.
The Problem of Geological Time for Design.
In his Natural Theology William Paley discussed the design of biological structures. However in 1800 little was known of the succession of life as the geological column had not been worked out, so that Paley could not have attempted to consider “creation” over geological time. As the geological column was elucidated, by 1820 a Progressive Creation over millions of years was seen as the most reasonable explanation, and inevitable from the fossil record, though Uniformitarians like Lyell rejected progressivism. This meant that instead of a few creative acts in the Six Days of Reconstitution,[7] there had been innumerable creative acts during the vastness of geological time. Thus the French geologist Alcide d’Orbigny’ (1850s) ‘recognised 27 successive fossil faunas in one part of the geological column (part of the Jurassic at Arromanches in Normandy) each of which he believed became entirely extinct as the next was created …’[8] This was used to justify his concept of a Geological Stage, which is still accepted though shorn of its creationist roots. If d’Orbigny were correct and that part of the Jurassic was 10 million years, then at the same rate of creation there would some have been some 1500 creations since the beginning of the Cambrian.[9]
This raised severe questions. Why did God create/design a succession of forms differing only slightly from previous forms? Why was extinction allowed?
Assuming evolution has not occurred, then the Designer returned at regular intervals to modify a previous creation as a motor manufacturer gives an annual revamp to their models.
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The Young Darwin on a non–evolutionary succession of life.
Phillips was a lifelong opponent of evolution, but Darwin made a fascinating use of Phillips’s ideas, while toying with evolution in his B notebook of 1837-8.[11] This was nine months before he read Malthus and thus predates Natural Selection. Darwin agreed with Phillips’ historical order of fossils, but not his successive creations. In B notebook we see Darwin the GEOLOGIST arguing historically and abductively for evolution.
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Miller in Finding Darwin’s God[15] mischievously considers design in relation to elephants with 22 species in the last 6 million years and many more going back to the Eocene. If all were “formed” at about the same time in c8000 BC, then the only reasonable explanation is some kind of intelligent intervention, which designed each to be different, rather like cars made by Chrysler or GM over several decades.
If geological timescale be correct, then these different fossil elephants appeared consecutively and despite “gaps” form a graded sequence. They indicate only “annual model upgrade”. Assuming that this is a fairly complete sequence, the Intelligent Designer seemed to have adopted the same sequence of modifications as would be expected by evolution. This is exactly the point Darwin made in his 1844 draft;
I must premise that, according to the view ordinarily received, the myriads of organisms, which have during past and present times peopled this world, have been created by so many distinct acts of creation. … That all the organisms of this world have been produced on a scheme is certain from their general affinities; and if this scheme can be shown to be the same with that which would result from allied organic beings descending from common stocks, it becomes highly improbable that they have been separately created by individual acts of the will of a Creator. For as well might it be said that, although the planets move in courses conformably to the law of gravity, yet we ought to attribute the course of each planet to the individual act of the will of the Creator.[16]
The example from Miller highlights why the avoidance of geological time results in problems. Behe focuses entirely on biochemistry and Dembski on detecting design. Both accept a long timescale but do not consider the implications for their understanding of Design. Thus the formation of biological complexity is considered without any reference to the history of life and its timescale in a way which is reminiscent of Lessing’s ditch in that “accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.”[17] The accidental truths of geology are simply ignored for the demonstration of Intelligent Design. In the volume The Creation Hypothesis Stephen Meyer argued cogently for The Methodological Equivalence of Design and Descent, but swung the argument in favour of design by omitting any reference to geological time. If geological time is accepted then the choice is between Phillips (design or multiple abrupt appearance) and Darwin (descent), as discussed above.
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Unless one rejects geological time, the fossil record points either to Progressive Creation with regular divine interventions (the common pre-Darwinian view), or evolution, possibly with occasional “interventions”. The starting point has to be an ancient earth and the ‘absolute knowledge that species die & others replace them’. To regard geological time as a subsidiary issue would deny that.
Design, Theistic Science and Naturalism, a historical perspective from 1690 to 1900.
Whereas Johnson, Behe and Dembski often present the case for Intelligent Design without reference to theology, Plantinga and Moreland stress the need for theistic science, whereby theology almost becomes part of science. Theistic Science is open to the direct activity of God, whereby these acts are demonstrated on theological grounds. Thus J. P. Moreland itemises ‘libertarian, miraculous acts of God’ being ‘the beginning of the universe, the direct creation of first life and the various kinds of life, the direct creation of human beings in the Middle East, the flood of Noah” and “for some, the geological column’[21] and the Crossing of the Red Sea[22]. This has great appeal to those who wish to stress the supernatural nature of Christian Belief.
John Ray and Edward Lhwyd
With the apparently Christian origin of science in the 17th century it is tempting to see science as moving from a theistic base to a naturalistic one over two centuries. This appears to be so in consideration of the formation of life and also the Flood as the cause of strata. Thus the Flood may be seen as an example of divine intervention and invoked from the 17th to the early 19th century. Because the 17th century Theorists of the Earth wrote so biblically of Creation, Flood and Conflagration their espousal of a kind of naturalism or “secondary causes” is overlooked. S.J.Gould expounds this, writing, ‘Burnet’s primary concern was to render earth history not by miracles, but by natural physical processes.’[23] Gould described Burnet as a ‘rationalist’; Johnson would call him a Naturalist. A similar willingness to explain geological features by natural processes is found in Ray’s discussion of erratic blocks[24] in the second edition of Miscellaneous Discourses concerning the dissolution of the world.[25] Ray was writing in response to a letter from Edward Lhwyd, who 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 and Nant Ffrancon valleys, which are two U-shaped glacial valleys. (Most of these rocks are erratics deposited by retreating glaciers.) As ‘there are but two or three that have fallen in the memory of any man now living, 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.’[26]
Lhwyd was reluctant to ascribe them to the Deluge and Ray commented evasively on Lhwyd’s findings to avoid facing the logic of Lhwyd’s comments.[27] On geological time Ray nailed his colours firmly to the fence, without explicitly rejecting an Ussher chronology. His evasiveness to Lhwyd shows that he was reluctant to posit a divine intervention at the Deluge. Ray equivocated between a naturalistic and a supernatural explanation.
Early 19th Century Geologists
Moving on to the 1820s, let us consider the clerical geologists Henslow, Sedgwick, Buckland and Conybeare, who contributed so much to geology; – Henslow on Anglesey[28], who influenced Darwin’s geology far more than Lyell, Sedgwick who elucidated the Cambrian and taught Darwin, Buckland for the first Mesozoic mammal and introducing Ice Ages to Britain and Conybeare on the Ichthyosaur. Cannon, in a classic article, claimed that they were Broadchurchmen,[29] i.e. proto-modernist, but Pennock portrayed Henslow and Sedgwick as ardent adherents of ‘the detailed hypotheses of catastrophist flood geology’,[30] which they allegedly taught Darwin. (ed. They didn’t and a future paper of mine will show what they taught him, but that probably won’t surface until 2025) Thus Henslow and Sedgwick were supernaturalist. Both cannot be right. Pennock has presented a simplistic either/or; either to be totally naturalistic like Darwin (possibly) became, or misguidedly basing one’s science on theology as did(n’t) Sedgwick and Henslow. It is a simple thesis, which misunderstands Sedgwick’s and Henslow’s geological method. Ironically Pennock’s polarisation is almost identical to Johnson’s, which he so effectively demolished in The Tower of Babel, where he distinguishes between ontological and methodological naturalism. As geologists, Henslow and Sedgwick were methodological naturalists, which becomes manifest when one studies their geology in the field in North Wales. They did not base their geology on ‘the detailed hypotheses of catastrophist flood geology’. Sedgwick’s geological work was straightforward stratigraphy of England from 1820 to 1831. After his so-called recantation in 1831 he started on Wales without change to his practice or theory in his fieldnotes or published papers. In 1825 he contributed a paper on the Origins of Alluvial and Diluvial Formations[31] which contained much good information on the “drift”, later seen as glacial. He realised that it had come from the north. He considered these ‘to demonstrate the reality of a great diluvian catastrophe during a comparatively recent period’ and that ‘It must … be rash and unphilosophical to look to the language of revelation for any direct proofs of the truths of physical science.’ In fact this is a short step from the Ice Age. Henslow wrote a short paper in 1822[32] in which he proposed that a passing comet caused the Flood. Here Henslow is re-iterating the naturalistic approach of Whiston 150 years earlier, where “Biblical Events” were explained by natural/secondary causes, and thus not libertarian acts of God. At about the same time Henslow mapped and described the geology of Anglesey. His memoir, which had such a great and unrecognised influence on Darwin’s geology,[33] is a superb pioneering work on Pre–Cambrian geology and contains no theology.
In contrast William Buckland at times called in divine agency to explain matters geological. However in his reconciliation of Christianity and geology in both Vindiciae Geologicae (1820) and Reliquiae Diluvianiae (1823) he explained geological phenomena in a naturalistic way without invoking God. Privately he invoked God for some libertarian interventions. In some (illegible) notes on the Deluge made in the early 1820s,[34] he grappled with the Deluge and geology and thought God may have recreated all life throughout the world after the flood waters as there no room in the ark, as well as contemplating a local Flood. Perhaps it is significant that Buckland’s public face was naturalistic, but in private considered divine intervention. That is the opposite of expectations, but does show that a leading geologist could be open to supernatural intervention in the 1820s. In the 1840s Buckland still regarded the Flood as a geological event but one caused by the Ice Age. In 1842 he wrote, that icebergs had been carried from the north by ‘a great diluvial wave or current’[35] reminiscent of Sedgwick in 1825
The Flood Geology and Diluvialism of the early 19th century had far more in common with Ryan and Pitman[36] on the Black Sea, than the divine hydraulics of Morris and Whitcomb[37]. Though Diluvialists like Conybeare regarded Uniformitarians, such as Scrope and Fleming (a Calvinist evangelical), as geese and donkeys, they were equally naturalistic in their geology. (It is probably better to say methodologically uniformitarian.[38])
From 1820 to 1860 one cannot divide geologists into Naturalists and Theists.[39] Many, Sedgwick, Buckland, Lyell (until 1864) etc., etc. were Naturalist and non–interventionist in geology and Theist and interventionist in their interpretation of the Fossil Record. Geological revolutions were natural but the creation of species was supernatural. This may be an inconsistent approach to the history of the earth and the life. The problems were well–known as from 1820 to 1860, many scientists were questioning the fixity of species The common view of Progressive Creationism was an unstable amalgam of supernaturalism and naturalism.
Darwin on ‘the ordinary view of Creation’.
Throughout the Origin of Species Darwin referred to ‘the ordinary view of creation’ and cited its weaknesses to make his ideas plausible. The rhetorical value of ‘the ordinary view of creation’ is discussed below, but its power was its lack of definition. Readers today will think of A Six Day Creation and that may have been Darwin’s intention, though Six-Day Creationism had virtually disappeared by 1855.[40] The ‘ordinary view of creation’ was, in fact, Progressive Creation, which was emphatic on geological time and the succession of life but frankly confused over the fixity of species, or how “vestigial organs” were designed. Darwin easily pointed out contradictions with devastating effect.
This he did in asking whether ‘species have been created at one or more points of the earth’s surface’ (352) He pointed out that geologists will find no difficulty for migration as, for example, when Britain was joined to the European mainland some millennia ago. And then he asked, ‘But if the same species can be produced at two separate points, why do we not find a single mammal common to Europe and Australia or South America?’ The implications he spelt out in detail comparing the Cape Verde Islands fauna with the Galapagos. The one flora and fauna was similar to Africa and the other South America, yet their climates and landscape were almost identical. His conclusion was that ‘this grand fact can receive no sort of explanation on the ordinary view of independent creation’. (398) He took this up again in the last chapter on naturalists ‘admit variation as a vera causa in one case, they arbitrarily reject it in another’ And then asked, with Miltonic undertones, ‘But do they really believe that at innumerable periods of the earth’s history certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues?’ (482)
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‘Theism’ and ‘Naturalism’ from the mid 19th Century
Yet Darwin retained some of ‘the ordinary view of creation’ for the initial Creation and the creation of life, virtually as libertarian acts of God. This enabled many Christians to accept his ideas, though often rejecting Natural Selection. Some added the creation of consciousness and of man as two more, whether they were Christian or not, for example, A. R. Wallace, the Scottish theologian James Orr and the American G. F. Wright.
Orr was a conservative Scottish Presbyterian whose Kerr Lectures for 1890-1 are significant. He discussed evolution in his lecture on The theistic postulate of the Christian view. He said, ‘On the general hypothesis of evolution,…, I have nothing to say, except that, within certain limits, it seems to me extremely probable, and supported by a large body of evidence’. What comes next has a most contemporary ring, ‘On this subject two views may be held. The first is, that evolution results from development from within, in which case, obviously, the argument from design stands precisely where it did, except that the sphere of its application is enormously extended. The second view is, that evolution has resulted from fortuitous variations …’[42] Clearly Orr rejects pure chance. His discussion of evolution is highly informed and he almost held a form of Punctuated Equilibrium as ‘The type persists through the ages practically unchanged. At other periods … there seems to be a breaking down of this fixity. The history of life is marked by a great inrush of new forms. …it in no way conflicts with design.’
But Orr wishes to go beyond Design; ‘The chief criticism … upon the design argument, …, is that it is too narrow. It confines the argument to final causes – … it is not the marks of purpose alone which necessitate this inference (of God) but everything which bespeaks of order, plan, arrangement, harmony, beauty, rationality in the connection and system of things.’ We are now back to Calvin, ‘the elegant structure of the world serving as a kind of a mirror, in which we may behold God, though otherwise invisible.’ and to Polkinghornes’ ‘inbuilt potentiality of creation’.
Orr seems to hover between van Till’s “creatonomic” view and Behe’s occasional interventions. Orr’s criticism that Design as understood in the early 19th Century is too narrow ought to be recognised. In a sense these writers were intermediate forms between theistic scientists and methodological naturalists, and thus do not fall into Pennock’s or Johnson’s simplistic categories. They also give the lie to the claim that Darwin killed Design.
Many years ago in his important study, Hooykaas[43] attempted to categorise the different approaches as Atheism, Deism, Semi–Deism, Supranaturalism and the Biblical view. Deism allowed no divine involvement after the initial creation, supranaturalism could imply capricious divine involvement, semi–deism the occasional interruption and the Biblical view stressed God’s involvement in Creation at all times. By Hooykaas’s delineation ‘the ordinary view of creation’ of Buckland and others, and Intelligent Design is Semi–Deism, or what van Till calls Punctuated Naturalism. It is an unstable position between deism (or even atheism) and supranaturalism. Hooykaas scarcely develops his “Biblical View” of which he writes: ‘In his providence, God usually guides the world according to constant rules, but, as He is a free agent, He gives order as well as deviation from order.’ This opens up the question of miracles as any creed which accepts the Virgin Birth or the Empty Tomb of the Resurrection must, in a sense, be super– or possibly supra– naturalist in the eyes of thorough–going naturalists. As with Griffin’s supernaturalism and minimal naturalism[44] it is difficult to draw the line.
To summarise; it is not possible to make a neat distinction of theistic and naturalistic science, especially when we consider historical examples. Both Pennock and Johnson oversimplify matters to fit into their respective rhetorical schemes. One must give Darwin the last word. He was never totally consistent in his naturalism and always said of himself, ‘I am in a hopeless muddle.’
A Restatement of Fact; rhetoric rather than argument in Design.
Rhetoric is an ambivalent term, but has been an essential feature of design arguments in the 19th century and in Intelligent Design. It may be considered as the persuasiveness of a lawyer where the argument is weak, but Phillip Johnson and Charles Lyell are not my concern! In their recent Gifford Lectures Brooke and Cantor discuss Natural Theology as Rhetoric and expound several examples from the 18th and 19th centuries including Buckland on Megatherium. They point out, “(I)t is important to re-emphasise that natural theologians did not deploy such evidence (from Design) to ‘prove’ (in the strong deductive sense) the existence and attributes of God.” The Design argument was an inductive argument and its conclusion was deemed a ‘moral’ truth. They cite Campbell, a contemporary writer, “In moral reasoning we ascend from possibility … to probability … to the summit of moral certainty.” They suggest “the persuasiveness of arguments suggest a close similarity between natural theology and the proceedings of the courtroom.” “Persuasion becomes the name of the game.”[45]
Considered in this light the Design Argument as employed by both Buckland and IDCs becomes a rhetorical argument with shades of a persuasive advocate. The rhetoric gives Design both its strength and its fatal flaw. This highly charged courtroom atmosphere was present in the Music Rooms at Holywell in 1832 when Buckland gave his tour de force on megatherium,[46] whom he christened Old Scratch.
Buckland gave a superb scientific account of its peculiar anatomy, but throughout the lecture was the implicit message, “the adaptation of Old Scratch is so wonderful and demonstrates the skill of the Designer, who is none but the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Buckland began with the possibility that sloths were not as poorly designed as Buffon and Cuvier claimed. As he described Old Scratch so favourably he moved to probability and then to the moral certainty of his theistic conclusion. This worked as Buckland gave an explanation of every part of its anatomy, but did not describe vestigial organs. In The Origin of Species Darwin picked up this flaw in Design arguments and how this was swept under the carpet by appeals to the Divine Plan. He wrote, “rudimentary organs are generally said to have been created ‘for the sake of symmetry’, or in order ‘to complete the scheme of nature;’ but this seems to me no explanation, merely a restatement of fact.” The fact being that God is the Creator.
Rhetoric in Behe
Behe also makes great use of rhetoric. Having led the reader through many explainable and unexplainable biochemical functions and the rhetorical appeal of his mousetrap, he uses an inductive rhetorical argument and argues that the absence of an explanation, as in the case of blood clotting, indicates the direct activity of a Designer. He rapidly moves from possibility to probability to moral certainty, but that certainty is only certain until an explanation is found. Behe’s mousetrap is a rhetorical flourish and his conclusion of a Designer is only a “restatement of fact” based on his original argument.
Darwin on the rhetoric in design and creation
At the end of The Origin of Species Darwin wrote, “It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the ‘plan of creation’, ‘unity of design’ &c., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact.” To argue rhetorically surely Intelligent Design is a restatement of fact? We may also see argument by rhetoric in the work of Richard Dawkins, most notably with his computer-simulated evolving biomorphs in The Blind Watchmaker. Here the rhetoric is based on contemporary faith in computer simulation rather than God, but is ultimately no proof of evolution and likewise is “a restatement of fact”. Hard proof would require an actual sequence of evolving plants or animals.
In the Origin of Species Darwin used rhetoric to persuade readers of his case for ‘descent by modification’. His persuasiveness is to be seen in the cumulative effect of his ‘one long argument’ as he moves from the known fact of “artificial selection” to natural selection. Here he follows the approach of rhetoric recommended by Campbell. In places his rhetoric contains some ridicule. This ridicule is more pungent in his essays of the 1840s and in 1842 wrote, ‘The creationist tells one, on a … spot the American spirit of creation makes … American doves’.[47] His discussion of the three rhinoceroses of Java, Sumatra and Malacca argues rhetorically for rejecting separate origin. As these three ‘scarcely differ more than breeds of cattle’ how is it that ‘the creationist believes these three rhinoceroses were created (out of the dust of Java, Sumatra,…) with their deceptive appearance of true … relationship; as well can I believe the planets revolve … not from one law of gravity but from distinct volition of Creator.’[48] These pachyderms did not make it to the Origin of Species, but Darwin developed this argument as part of his conclusion. He wrote,’It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the ‘plan of creation’, ‘unity of design’, etc., and to think we give an explanation when we only restate a fact.’ Darwin would say the same about ID today.
There is a parallel between Darwin’s and Dembski’s arguments. As Darwin moves from Artificial to Natural Selection, Dembski moves from intelligent causes in forensic science, cryptography and archaeology to intelligent causes in the natural world. He argues if we accept intelligent causes in the former, we ought to consider them ‘a legitimate domain for scientific investigation’ for the latter.[49] This has a considerable (rhetorical?) appeal but we must be clear how we can determine the intentional design of an Intelligent Designer or outside cause, beyond that of wonder and awe. That Dembski and others have failed to do.
The problem of designed and undesigned Creation in Intelligent Design.
During the last half millennium the Genesis account of Creation has been variously understood. The dominant view during the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries was the Chaos-Restitution interpretation, with an initial undefined period of Chaos, followed by a re-creation with several creative acts spread over six days.[50] A minority, following Archbishop Ussher, reduced the period of Chaos to twelve hours, thus confining the time for all creation to six days. This was later adopted by a minority in the early 19th century and YECs today, though it would be truer to say that YEC stems from the Seventh Day Adventists.[51]
……
Split level Creation in Intelligent Design
In their understanding of Creation IDCs open themselves to having a split-level understanding of Creation, as part designed and part not. Behe states that, “If a biological structure can be explained in terms of those natural laws, then we cannot conclude that it was designed.”[54] To take one of Behe’s examples haemoglobin is not designed, but blood-clotting is. This is in contrast to Design of Paley and Buckland where all is designed. Buckland took this to its extreme in his lecture on Megatherium, which as a sloth both Buffon and Cuvier thought was poorly designed. Buckland would have none of that and showed how such an apparently ill-designed beast was superbly designed ‘to dig potatoes’!
………..
They adopt reverse engineering[56], and where this accomplishes a reduction to unintelligent causes, as in the case of haemoglobin according to Behe, then that is NOT designed. Design is reserved only for those features, which cannot be explained by reverse engineering. By this they think they ensure a place for the creative activity of the Intelligent Designer – God. Our two advocates of reverse engineering; Buckland and Dennett would concur that ultimately a reason for any structure will be found. If the Intelligent Design argument is followed consistently the result is a two-tier Creation.
To put matters as baldly as possible.
Paley saw the demonstration of Design in explaining.
ID sees the demonstration of Design in not-explaining.
……..
Finally one should ask whether Design on its own is a biblical idea. I think not and consider that an over-emphasis on Design, (Paleyan or ID) pushes the concept beyond breaking point, as Orr stressed in 1890. The emphasis should be on God the Creator not God the Designer. If we follow the former and emphasise the Creator, we can say with Gerard Manley Hopkins;
The World is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
If we follow Intelligent Design, then we must parody Hopkins’ poem;
The clotting of blood is charged with the grandeur of God
It will ooze out, like shining from shook foil.
But haemoglobin is not charged with the grandeur of God.
We know not when to reck his rod.[57]
CONCLUSION
Design is but one of the “natural” arguments for God and in its classic form evolves from the Physico-theology of the 17th century. However, both in its classical form in Paley and in Intelligent Design, Design arguments have tended to avoid the issue of geological time. In Paley’s case this was because geological time and the succession of species was scarcely known. With Intelligent Design there is a deliberate strategy to avoid ‘subsidiary issues like the age of the earth’ – probably to retain the support of young earth creationists. It is essential to see the vast age of the earth and universe as a matter of “Rational Compulsion”, as opposed to Evolution which is an “inference to the best explanation”.[58] It is because an evolutionary perspective on the succession of life provided a better “inference to the best explanation” in the 1860s that the Progressive Creationism of Sedgwick, Phillips and others was rejected.
The appeal for a theistic science begs many questions. In the hands of Johnson it tends to posit two polarised models of science – materialist and empirical – which does not allow the diversity of opinion over science. This results in a game of Ping-Pong[59] forcing an extreme either/or. These models do not survive historical scrutiny whether we consider Ray, Sedgwick or Darwin himself. This Ping-Pong over ID is often used as a poor rhetorical device.
Finally here is Adam Sedgwick, after he supposedly gave up ‘the detailed hypotheses of catastrophist flood geology’ in 1831;
To the supreme Intelligence, indeed, all the complex and mutable combinations we behold, may be the necessary results of some simple law, regulating every material change, and involving within itself the very complications, which we, in our ignorance, regard as interruptions in the continuity of Nature’s work.[60]
That is a far better statement of the relevance of the classical theological understanding of Creation to science than the Punctuated Naturalism of Intelligent Design which inadvertently denies the involvement of the Creator in all creation.
[1] J. Calvin, Institutes, Book 1, Chapter 5, section 1.
[2] J. Calvin, Institutes, Book 1, Chapter 5, section 2.
[3] J. H. Brooke and G. Cantor Reconstructing Nature, 1998. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 217
[4] H. Miller, The Testimony of the Rocks, 1858, London, 238–44
[5] F. Temple The Relations between Science and Religion, 1884 London:Longmans, p113
[6] N. Pearcey, Design and the Discriminating Public, Touchstone, July/Aug 1999, p26.
To my mind the error at Kansas was to omit the teaching of geology and the age of the earth in high school science. See Keith Miller, Perspectives on Science and Faith, 1999, vol 51, p220-1
[7] Reconstitution and not Creation as the dominant understanding of Genesis One, was that God first created Chaos and then after an undefined interval “reconstituted” it. M. B. Roberts, The Genesis of John Ray and his Successors, Evangelical Quarterly, April 2002, vol. LXXIV, 143–64.
[8] John Thackray The Age of the Earth 8
[9] This is a crude calculation based on some 27 creations every 10 m.y.; i.e.27×55 creations since the beginning of the Cambrian, i.e. a mere 1485 creations.
[10] J Phillips, Supplementary note in Baden Powell Connexion of Natural and Divine Truth, 1838, London p369. cited J.P.Smith The relation between the Holy Scripture and some parts of geological science, London, 1848, p60.
[11] Darwin, C.D., B notebook, (P.H.Barrett, P.J.Gautry, S. Herbert, D.Kohn & S.Smith, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836 – 1844, !987, Cambridge:Cambridge Univ Press.
[12] A Jurassic marsupial first described by Buckland in 1824.
[13] P. J. Bowler The Non–Darwinian Revolution, 1988, Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, passim
[14] P.Johnson, The Wedge, Touchstone, July/August 1999, p19-20.
[15] K. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God, 1999, New York: Harper Collins95–9
[16] C Darwin The Essay of 1844, Works of Charles Darwin, vol. 10, p133/4
[17] H Chadwick ed Lessing’s Theological Writings, 1956, London: A. & C. Black, 53
[18] Stephen Meyer, The Methodological Equivalence of Design and Descent, 67–112. K. Wise, The Origin of Life’s Major Groups, 211–34, p 226 in J.P.Moreland (ed), The Creation Hypothesis, 1994 Downers Grove: Inter Varsity Press.
[19] This is clear if one reads through the Transactions of the Geological Society of London and similar journals from 1810. Many of the papers are tedious stratigraphic and palaeontological descriptions substantiating Bragg’s charge that geology is stamp–collecting! But they show how undoctrinaire stratigraphy is, as it unravelled the chronology of the earth.
[20] N. Eldredge, The Triumph of Evolution, 2000, New York: W. H. Freeman, p42–8
[21] J.P.Moreland, The Creation Hypothesis, 1994 p51
in ed. W. Dembski, Mere Creation, 1998, Downers Grove: Inter Varsity Press, p265–88.
[22] Presumably Moreland would favour C. B. de Mille’s interpretation of the crossing of the Red Sea.
[23] S. J. Gould ‘Burnet’s Dirty Little Planet’ in Ever since Darwin 1980 Harmondsworth: Penguin, 144
[24] Erratic Blocks are boulders of various sizes which were transported up to 100 miles or more by ice during the Ice Ages and are found in the northern US, Britain and Northern Europe.
[25] John Ray, Miscellaneous Discourses concerning the dissolution of the world, 1691
[26] As there are at least 10,000 boulders in the Llanberis Pass and 60 years is the memory of any man, that gives an “age” of 10,000 x 20 = 200,000 years.
[27] Ray op. cit. ref 11, p285-289.
[28] J. S. Henslow, ‘Geological description of Anglesey’, Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 1 (1822)
[29] W/S Cannon, “Scientists and Broadchurchmen”, 1964, Journal of British Studies 4:65–88
[30] R. T. Pennock, The Tower of Babel, 1999, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, p61.
[31] A.Sedgwick, Origins of Alluvial and Diluvial Formations, Annals of Philosophy 1825, cited from Clark and Hughes, Life and Letters of Adam Sedgwick,1890
[32] J. S. Henslow, “On the deluge”, 1823, Ann Phil, vi: 344–8
[33] See my A longer look at the Darwin–Sedgwick tour of North Wales 1831, forthcoming . I am preparing another paper on how Henslow, through his Anglesey memoir, influenced Darwin while on the Beagle – probably far more than Lyell.
[34] In the Deluge file at University Museum Oxford.
[35] W.Buckland, On the Glacia- diluvial Phaenomena in Snowdonia, Proc Geol Soc iii, 1842, p 579-84.
[36] W. Ryan and W. Pitman, Noah’s Flood, 1999, New York: Simon and Schuster.
[37] H. M. Morris and J. C. Whitcomb, The Genesis Flood, Nutley: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1961
[38] S. J. Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, 1988, Harmondsworth: Penguin,
[39] I use the term Theist in the same way as Intelligent Designers today, to make my point.
[40] In Britain the only examples I can think of are Gosse and B.W.Newton. In the USA there were Moses Stuart, Dabney and a few others.
[41] W. Dembski, Intelligent Design,1999, Downers Grove: Inter Varsity Press 126
[42] J.Orr, The Christian View of God and the World, Edinburgh, 1897, p98ff.
[43] Hooykaas 170ff
[44] David Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000).
[45] This is based very closely on Brooke, J & Cantor, G, Reconstructing Nature, Edinburgh, T & T Clark, 1998, p181-2.
[46] The manuscript of Buckland’s lecture is cited with permission from Mrs D. K. Harman.
[47] C Darwin The Essay of 1844, Works of Charles Darwin, vol. 10, p31. N.B. This was a rough draft, hence uncompleted sentences.
[48] Op cit p 49.
[49] Dembski p105
[50] M. B. Roberts, “The Genesis of John Ray and his successors”, Evangelical Quarterly, vol. LXXIV, no 2, (2002), p143–64.
[51] R. Numbers, The Creationists, 1991, New York: Knopf..
[52] This is a deliberate statement as Chalmers was NOT the originator of the Gap Theory. R. Kirwan, Geological Essays, London, 1799, 47.
[53] G. S. Faber, A Treatise of the Three Dispensations, London 1823, pp111–65.
[54] M.Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, 1996, New York: The Free Press, p203.
[55] H van Till in Denis Lamoureux ed Darwinism Defeated? 1999. “ The intelligent design concept as it has been promoted by Johnson, with its intense emphasis on episodes of form-imposing intervention and its frequent association of material processes with naturalistic causes, could be more accurately called a theory of punctuated naturalism.” (p. 88)
[56] D. C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 1995, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
[57] ‘rod’ used in the Authorised Version to mean ‘sceptre’, a symbol of God’s power (see Psalm 23 vs 4)
[58] Dembski, Intelligent Design, 1999, p195-8.
[59] B Mitchell, How to play theological ping-pong, 1987, London: Hodder and Stoughton, p166ff
[60] A Sedgwick, Anniversary Address to the Geological Society, 18 Feb 1831, Proc. Geol. Soc I(1834), 281–316; 302
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Peddling and Scaling God and Darwin 