The emergence of structured evolutionary ideas coincided with the birth of the new and extremely complex science of geology, which led in particular to intensive scrutiny of the orthodox teaching that the earth was only six thousand years old, and that all or most of the earth’s rock strata and their fossil content had been formed by the great Flood of Noah described in Genesis. At the time, however, fossils were poorly understood and even the suggestion that they represented traces of once-living organisms had been severely frowned on.

The Italian Job
One man who dared to speak his mind, however, was the Italian Nicolas Steno(1631-1687), an expert anatomist who became interested in geological matters—risking the wroth of the establishment by claiming that some fossils found in the his country’s northern hills had once been shark’s teeth, actual parts of living creatures

Steno realized that many rock strata were formed by sediments deposited by turbulent water – currents moving first this way than that, transporting and depositing particles of various weights and sizes depending on their densities and the speed at which the water moved. He also suggested that the tilted, arched and even vertical strata he examined had originally been deposited horizontally over extended areas -- and had been disturbed by massive earth movements, including volcanic activity, on land and under the seas, which served to bake and harden the sediments, sometimes forming “metamorphic” rock, such as slate which started out as silt.

All this activity, Steno realized, required far more time than the few months allowed for in the Genesis account of Noah’s Flood – a fact that he saw as an insuperable barrier to the popular acceptance of his theories.

As a result of his contributions, Steno is regarded by many as the father of modern geology, a title conferred by others on the great James Hutton.

Some Interesting Clues in Genesis
As will be discussed in more detail later, some of interesting clues in the Genesis account of Noah’s flood suggests that its effects were not as cataclysmic as young-earth creationists claim. Firstly, for example, as the flood waters subsided, Noah sent out a dove that brought back a freshly plucked olive leaf—which suggests that the trees, at least in that locality, were still standing, and that the flood’s impact on the earth’s topography was minimal.

Secondly, when building the ark, Noah sealed the seams inside and out with pitch, an extract of fossilized plant matter – suggesting the possibility of fossilization of organisms in a previous, pre-Adamic age, as the precise wording of Genesis chapter one clearly allows.

James Hutton
Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726-97), who was born about a century after Steno, reached similar conclusions concerning the origins of the earth’s rock formations. As a Christian person he strongly believe that the earth was a kind of machine created and provisioned by God for human habitation – but that the present land and geological strata were not the primordial ones, having been “formed by the operation of secondary causes”. In other words, the useful soil that he had learned to cultivate so effectively in this fourteen years as a farmer, the gravel beds, the clay and chalk, the limestone, the coal and oil and rich metal ore deposits had all been created by God from the original pristine igneous rock material by slow processes of erosion and sedimentation – all in preparation for the habitation of man.

The fact that Hutton suggested that “a preceding world” had been destroyed by such processes, make one wonder if he too had rejected the orthodox young-earth teaching of most churches and also entertained the possibility of a pre-Adamic era..

Envisioning the endless operation over millions of years of what he called “the great geological cycle”, Hutton stated that earth offers “no vestige of a beginning - no prospect of an end”, hence the concept of “uniformitarianism”, the idea that the geological forces that created our world were the same as those now at work - a deliberate attempt, perhaps to counter the claim that all had been produced by Noah’s world-wide flood. Uniformitarianism does not, however, exclude the possibility of the occasional local catastrophes – such as earthquake, flood or volcanic eruption.

One wonders again if Hutton’s thinking here was influenced by the Bible, for example by the metaphor in Psalm 102 (verses:25-26) and other places that compares the heavens and the earth to garments gradually wearing out and needing to be changed.
One wonders also if other scriptures inspired Hutton’s model of the earth as a kind of machine made for the service of man – Moses’ brief description, for example, of the geological treasures locked up in the land of Canaan, Quote: “God is bringing you to a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing forth in the valleys and hills . . . you will lack nothing, land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper” (Deuteronomy 8:8-9).

Those mineral resources must have existed long before Noah’s flood, as evidenced by the fact that one of Adam’s immediate descendants, Tubal-Cain made implements of bronze and iron (Genesis 4:22) – and that one of the rivers flowing out of Eden traversed a land where gold and precious stones were to be found (Genesis 2:10-12). Incidentally, this same section, written after the Flood, suggests that the original geography, including the river courses, had remained unchanged.

The New Athens
It is said that the Edinburgh of Hutton’s day was called the “New Athens” and was probably the most intellectually stimulating city in the world—an intellectual society inhabited by the likes of the poet Robert Burns, the chemist Joseph Black, the engineer James Watt and the economist Adam Smith. In this society, Hutton found people who fostered and welcomed new ideas. However, despite his intellect, his own writing was characterised, we are told, by “a degree of obscurity astonishing to all who knew him”.

Hutton was, incidentally, the first person to explain how rain forms from the condensation of water vapour when warm air masses saturated with moisture are cooled by collision with cold air masses from more northern latitudes. He also speculated as to the nature of “reality”, in language reminiscent of articles in modern scientific journals, suggesting, for example, that what we perceive is not physically real, but merely a construct of the mind.

However, in matters geological, his thinking was based on many years of practical hands-on observation of rock formations in various parts of the world. Like Steno, Hutton found it impossible to accept that Noah’s flood had not only created all the rock strata, but in some locations had also turned them vertical, eroded the ends level, and then deposited more layers on top in a giant T-formation – as demonstrated at Siccar Point , Scotland, a formation once described as “the daddy of all British unconformities”.

The Survival of the Fittest
According to a document not discovered until 1947, Darwin’s crucial concept of the “survival of the fittest” in the struggles of life had been suggested a hundred years earlier by non other than James Hutton - who speculated that organisms best suited to their surroundings were the ones “most certain of surviving”. However, credit for coining the famous phrase itself, which did not actually appear in “The Origin of Species” until the fifth edition, is given to the philosopher Herbert Spencer.

Sir Charles Lyell
Charles Lyell, born a couple of months before James Hutton died, carried the new science of geology forward with immense energy , and popularised Hutton’s teachings in his classic book “The Principles of Geology – an Attempt to explain the former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes now in Operation”.

Much to Darwin’s delight, Lyell thus rejected rapid-acting mechanisms such as floods and cataclysms as geological agents, teaching instead the uniformitarian principle that strata were deposited extremely slowly over millions of years – a process evidently made possible by continents rising and falling at convenient intervals to enable gradual ingressions and regressions of the sea. As already noted, in some locations, as evidenced by the scores of layers of coal bedding, some kind of geological yo-yo appears to have been very actively at work.

According to Lyell, the hundreds of coal beds that exist in some parts of the earth were produced by these repeated terrestrial ups and downs, despite the fact that very often multiple beds may be found to be pierced by a single fossilised tree trunk, a “polystrate” fossil.

Creationists, who imagine that most sedimentary strata resulted from Noah’s flood, suggest that the most of these multiple beds were all formed at the same time by great masses of vegetation being transported and deposited in haphazard fashion by powerful currents of water.

On a trip to the United States, we are told, Lyell applied unformitarian principles in estimating the annual rate of regression of Niagra Falls due to the friction of the moving water – and also the rate of accumulation of silt particles at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

One of his major contributions was to help organize the systematic naming and dating of rock strata on the basis of the fossils they contained—leading, thanks to the coordinated efforts of a number of workers, to the drawing up of the notional “Geological Column”, the whole consisting of three major Eras—each broken down into Periods and then, in some cases, Epochs. Lyell was personally responsible for naming three Epochs of the Tertiary Period -- the “Eocene” (Dawn of recent), the “Miocene” (More recent), and the “Pliocene” (Most recent). [Ed: In his search for Darwin’s missing links, I understand that Lyell also investigated the “Unscene”, the “Notscene” and the “Neverscene”!]

Lyell also developed the technique of using “index fossils”, whereby strata, independent of whether they consist of sandstone or chalk, for example, are dated by their fossil content. Simple as that may sound, very similar fossils may appear mixed with other forms in several strata, and Lyell devised a complicated dating method which involved comparing the relative percentages of the several fossils in each in order to assign the appropriate label.

Deep Time
The concept of “deep time” afforded by Lyell’s yo-yo was to prove crucial to Darwin because it conjured up the vast ages required for the relentless operation of “Natural Selection” to work on tiny and very occasional random variations in organisms – a process eloquently described by him as: “daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being . . . “

There was a temporary scare for Darwinism in the 1890’s when the great physicist, and thermodynamic expert Lord Kelvin estimated the age of the earth to be relatively young, about 30 million years, far too young for geologists’ liking, by calculating how long a sphere of molten magma of the same size would take to cool to its present temperature.

Faulty Scientific Assumptions
So confident was Kelvin that his figures were correct and that geologists were wrong, he said: “A great reform in geological speculation now seems necessary . . . a great mistake has been made”. As has happened so often in science, however, it was he who had made the “great mistake”, with the result that what seemed like absolute certainty turned out to be wrong because of a faulty assumption.

Kelvin had obtained such a young an age for the earth because he was not aware that much of the heat being lost from its surface was being compensated for by nuclear energy being released in its interior – without which the earth would now be far, far cooler and hence appear to be much, much older.

A few years later, just after the turn of the century, the phenomenon of radioactivity was discovered, enabling Kelvin’s younger contemporary, Ernest Rutherford, to use measurements on the decay of uranium into lead, and the subsequent release of helium, to date the age of the earth as some 500 million years. When it was later pointed out that much of the helium created and trapped in rocks must have diffused out and so escaped Rutherford’s detection, the age figure was revised radically upwards – and evolutionists could smile again. Current estimates are in excess of four billion years.
However, as we see later, according to G-Theory the actual or imagined age of the earth has no relevance to the origin of the plants and animals with which we are familiar.

Pre-Cambrian Rocks
In keeping with the expectations of the G-Theory of creation and James Hutton’s suggestions, geologists tell us that the bulk of world’s valuable minerals – gold, silver, nickel, copper, iron and chromium – are found in the most ancient of all rock strata, the Pre-Cambrian.

Mesozoic Rocks
Geologist also tell us that 50% of the world’s oil reserves, fossilized remains of sea creatures, were formed in ancient Mesozoic times, when the Earth’s climate was much warmer with temperate conditions at the poles, and with lush tropical forest conditions extending to latitude 45, north and south. Europe’s massive North Sea oil and gas deposits, however, are said to be of Palaeozoic origin, having later diffused and been trapped in porous Permian sandstone formations.

A Dramatic Transition
The final period of the Mesozoic era, the Cretaceous, has been described as the “transition between the very different earlier Earth and the Cenozoic, a world relatively similar to that of the present day”. This evidence of a dramatic transition from an alien prehistoric world to our present age is one of the key discoveries of geology – the implication of which is that the array of bizarre and grotesque creatures evidenced by Palaeozoic and Mesozoic fossils were not the ancestors of the earth’s present flora and fauna, and were, in any case, all fully-formed complex organisms in their own right, not the unfit transitional forms Darwin’s theory required

Cenozoic Rocks
It was during the Cenozoic (i.e. recent) or Cainozoic period that placental mammals came on the scene, leading the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” to comment: “the Cenozoic placental mammals were poised to take over the terrestrial environment, as soon as the dinosaurs vanished”.

Early in the Cenozoic, in the Eocene, mammals, such as horses, sheep, pigs, dogs, cats, giraffe and deer make their first appearance in the fossil record. Some of those were the first ruminants, creatures such as cows that chew the cud, one of the guidelines in the Law of Moses for the identification of “clean” animals – i.e. those fit for human consumption, in contrast to “unclean” creatures such as slugs and snakes and even pigs
Some of these creatures grew to very large proportions, for example, the mammoth, its cousin the mastodon, the sabre-toothed tiger, and the famous Irish Elk, which was seven feet tall at the shoulder, with an antler span of 12 feet. Although these creatures are now extinct, they were clearly mutants of kinds now existing.

Their disappearance from the scene is another mystery, and one suggestion is that they were hunted out of existence by early man – not, apparently, as the result of severe constipation, one of the theories seriously proposed to explain the demise of the dinosaurs, a suggestion probably resulting from a consideration of the practicality of vast amounts of food and faecal matter needing to be transported long distances through very large bodies!

According to G-Theory, the Cenozoic era would seem to equate to the age between Adam and Noah – the world whose creation is described in the Genesis account of Creation Week, the world that was destroyed in the Deluge. Although scientists divide the era up into seven epochs and attempt to trace some kind of evolutionary trail through them, their findings are confused and the subject of much disagreement.

It was during the Cenozoic, also, that the also world assumed its modern configuration, the one shown on any school atlas.

The Deluge
Young-earth creationists actively bring the Bible into scientific disrepute, I believe, by rejecting the findings of geology and insisting not only that the earth is only six thousand years old, but that much or most sedimentary rock strata and their fossil content were created by the waters of the great and apparently world-wide flood of Noah.

At the time of Adam, according to scripture, God had no intention of bringing a future Flood on mankind, as the Genesis account makes clear when it says: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Genesis 6:5-6).

Jewish legends have it that in addition to violence there was debauchery, including incest, on a massive scale. Archaeologists also report evidence of cannibalism in what are believed to be Flood deposits. Since the Bible is virtually silent about the pre-Flood world, we have no idea how advanced their technology may have been, but one may wonder if monstrosities such as the Minotaur of Greek myth, supposedly the child of the wife of Minos by a bull, might have been the outcome of a perverted genetic experimentation gone wrong – or whether some of the stories of Greek mythology originated in the pre-flood era when there were literal giants living on the earth (Genesis chapter 6).

That said, if the flood was not originally intended when man was created, then the earth on which Adam and Eve walked must have been already equipped, like Hutton’s “machine”, with all the coal seams and other natural resources needed by man to live a good and constructive life.

Is it possible, therefore, that much or most of the earth’s massive rock strata and their fossils were formed in a previous age, in a mysterious and violent pre-Adamic world that perished prior the so-called seven days of creation? That was the belief of some early Christian geologists, as we shall see.

Two Kinds of Earth
It should be pointed out here that the Hebrew word rendered “earth” is used in two ways in the Genesis account – first, to refer to the complete earth, the globe and the sea waters covering it (Genesis 1:1), and second, in later verses, to describe just the continents that were raised up to form the “earth” (Genesis 1:10), the dry, habitable land, the part that was separated from the waters of the oceans that had been drained off, which were then named “seas”.

When the Bible says (Exodus 20:11) that God “created” the heavens and the earth in seven days, the word “earth” refers to the land man later lived on, that had been drained and made habitable during creation week, not the whole planet, which had evidently been created possibly many millions of years earlier.

The topography of the pre-existing land mass that was uplifted to form the new “earth” in just one day, as Genesis describes, must have been massively scoured and gouged by torrents of sea water running off with a violence probably testified to by the Grand Canyon – the strata of which young-earth creationists insist were formed by the Deluge.

A common sense reading of Genesis shows that planet “earth” as a total entity, already existed in a state of chaos and darkness before the so-called “creation week even began – and it seems significant that the account describes only the uplifting of existing land to form the “earth” and the seas, with nothing said to suggest any kind of interior activity or changes.

The violence of the cataclysmic destruction that evidently overtook that pre-Adamic age, seems to be evidenced by the surface of the moon and the close-up pictures of planets sent back by NASA space probes.

If a pre-Adamic world did indeed exist and was totally destroyed, it follows that most of the fossil record has no connection, evolutionary or otherwise, with the flora and fauna of this present world.

The Present and Future Heavens and Earth
The apostle Peter points out in a verse that appears to be referring to the Deluge, that the “earth” existing prior to Noah was actually “destroyed” (2 Peter 3:6) – so that our present earth is technically not the one that was reformed in Genesis. Notice that Peter adds that the “present heavens and earth” will also be “destroyed” at some time in the future, but this time by fire, and with it the wicked (verse 7). As a result, yet another heaven and earth will be brought into being (verse 13).

According to the ancient prophet Malachi, that future “new” earth will also be created by recycling the materials of the present earth, with the wicked people mentioned by Peter then being “ashes under the soles of your feet” (Malachi 4:3) – just as the remains of the dinosaurs and other violent creatures were fossils under the feet of Adam and Eve. Despite that fact, the new earth will also be “good”, as was that of Adam and Eve originally.