The Age of the Earth - Episode 2

Firmly entrenched and supported by the church, Ussher’s date seemed impregnable. However, some sceptics put forward their own versions. A French Calvinist and lawyer, La Peyrere in 1641 postulated that there had been people on Earth before Adam. This was heresy and of course was banned by Cardinal Richelieu, the prime minister of France. Essentially a pragmatic and fair man, he however realised what effect La Peyrereses manuscript might have in France. La Peyrere kep this freedom, but he did not desist with his theories, eventually in 1655 invoking the wrath of the Catholic Church. He was arrested, interred and forced to recant his heretical views – in short he got off lightly. Enter another player on this grand stage – a Jesuit missionary, Farther Martino Martini, who was carrying out missionary work in China.

Martino Martini

On telling the Chinese that mankind had been destroyed by God in a great deluge, they greeted his pronouncements with great hilarity and disbelief. Their own history stretched well beyond the so-called date of the Flood, and they had records to prove it. A reversal of roles took place, with Martini realising that the ancient Chinese chronology posed a serious challenge to the authority of the bible. In 1654 he returned to Europe, where he published an account of Chinese history, receiving of course the usual disbelief and hostility which marked all other controversial ideas perpetuated at the time. However arrest and persecution was out of the question as Martini had returned to China to further his missionary work. Europe continued her dyed-in-the-wool approach, but slowly thinking was evolving, with crucial intellectual shift away from biblical textual authority towards an enquiry based on scientific principles. Throughout Europe the cry was the same: rocks, not books were believed to hold the secrets of the past. And indeed they did, and still do, and it was left to the natural philosophers to prove the age of the world.

One of the more interesting notions of the 17th Century was that the Earth had been created fully formed; flat, beautiful, unblemished, with no disease, famine, mountains or deserts to blemish her perfect face. A golden age had existed before the Flood, and age when all God’s blessings were poured out onto the world – in short a perfect God had created a perfect world. But now things were in decline – the Earth had become old and wrinkled, volcanoes and deserts were carbuncles and scars on the face of the Earth. An old prophecy that the world would last only 6000 years was being confirmed by nature. The thinking was that the Earth had run most of its days, and doomsday was not far off, perhaps only 350 years in the future (taking of course the date of 4004 BC as the day of creation).

However this idea of an ageing Earth brought the notion of a world in flux and a constant state of change to the fore, and it was Rene Descartes who lead the break with the literal interpretation of the bible. Reason was the reason de etre. Paris, 1625, and our clever and sociable Descartes had become the leading light of Parisian intellectual life – a time when libertine free thinkers were making their mark. Caution was always necessary and a weather eye was kept open for gathering storm clouds in the direction or Rome. One Giulio Vanini, a ‘heretic’ doctor, had had his tongue cut out before being strangled and burned six years before for voicing some anti religious views. Inevitably the storm broke and Descartes moved to Holland, a country which has always had a tradition of tolerance and liberalism which endures to this day. He began his philosophical treatise, The World, which was to be a completer revision of philosophy which he eventually published in 1641.

Rene Descartes

However it was a watered-down version of his original manuscript as it was a bad time for liberal thinkers. Galileo had recently been arrested and forced to recant his heretical views that the Earth went around the Sun. Descartes’ view of the world was essentially that a few simple laws governed the universe, and these laws were what created the complex world around us. The world had the same relationship to God as a clock had to the clock maker – once it had been carefully constructed and set in motion, there was little more involvement from the creator. His ultimate achievement was to remove God from the day to day running of the world. Until then the belief was that God was intimately involved in the day to day, minute to minute running of the world. God may have created the world, but it was then governed by the laws of nature.

To be continued.......................

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The Age of the Earth – Episode 1

All this frantic subdividing and classifying based on rock types and fossil assemblages allowed for a systematic assessment of the order of the ancient strata. Relatively, those early geologists knew which rocks preceded others, but no one had the faintest idea how old they were in absolute terms. Which brings us to some of the other great controversies of the geology which raged from 1650 to the middle of the 20th Century. Two thousand years ago the idea that the world might have a starting point was inconceivable. Most of the ancients believed that the Universe had existed forever, and that recurring cycles of creation and destruction were part of the clockwork which was so evidently displayed in the endless cycling of the heavenly bodies overhead – clear manifestations of the cyclical machinations of the Universe. The Hindus believed that the shortest cycle, the Maha Yuga, lasted 4320 000 years. A thousand Maha Yugas made up one Kalpa, and two Kalpas completed a single day in the life of Brahma. After this, eveyone was reincarnated and the cycle repeated.

Similar ideas were manifest in ancient Greece, and Plato suggested that the length of a cycle was defined by the time it took for all the planets to return to their same relative positions in their orbits, which they had occupied at an earlier time. This time period of 36 000 years was known as the magnus annus – the great year. However just one civilisation in the ancient world ascribed to a different idea – that the heavens and the Earth had been created by God, and that there was a beginning. This Jewish notion was adopted by Christianity, and with the concept of a beginning now firmly planted in the thinking of the Christian world, it was only a matter of time before someone attempted to set a date to it.

The most influential was Bishop Ussher who set it at 6 pm on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC. We may well pour scorn on this date but there are those who still subscribe to this improbably precise reckoning and it may still be seen in the margins of some old bibles printed around the turn of the last century. Bishop Ussher was no fool mind you. The genealogy of the book of Genesis, the biblical account of creation of the world, runs to 21 generations. Precise dates of the lengths of the lives of the various protagonists are also given, and by totting up the numbers on can arrive at a precise date of creation. This is exactly what Ussher did. No one was more qualified than he, having learned Latin as a boy, and after joining Trinity College in Dublin in 1593, he pursued the date relentlessly, teaching himself Hebrew and Greek so as to better understand the ancient texts from which he was working. He built up Trinity College’s library into what was probably the largest collection of learned works in the world at the time – a total of 4000 volumes. He himself owned 10 000 at the end of his life. He had access to the libraries of London, Cambridge and Oxford, and rubbed shoulders with the free thinkers of the time – Frances Bacon and Ben Jonson.

In 1624 at the age of 44 he was appointed Bishop of Armagh, the most senior position in the Church of Ireland. Issues of which version of the Bible to use in determining this date – for example the Greek-derived Septuagint Bible used by the Orthodox church gave dates which stretched back almost 1000 years earlier than the Hebrew-derived Bible. Adding to the difficulties was the fact that different nations had different ideas as to how long a year actually was, and different dates for the beginning of the year. In addition, astronomical records were used to help tie down dates. For example the date of the birth of Christ was based on the following account:

“As for the other Mathias who had stirred up the sedition, Herod had him burnt alive, together with his companions. And that very night there was an eclipse of the moon.”

The thinking was that Jesus must have been born before this date, and that the great astronomer Keppler leant his weight to this argument, opting for the date of March 14th 4 BC, which is in fact the accepted year of Jesus’ birth today. Ussher’s consulted far and wide, had agents in the Near East buying up ancient texts, and devoted his entire life to the quest. Secular problems also intruded into his world, including rebellion in Ireland and dodgy political connections in England which led to his arrest during the English Civil War. If Cromwell was ready to behead King Charles I, what qualms would he have about severing the head of a mere bishop? Ussher managed to weather these storms to the extent that he was given a state burial by Cromwell, so esteemed was he in Irish and English society. Certainly he was a formidable scholar and made maximum use of the resources available to him, and although we can look on at his date with faint amusement, we must remember that he was a product of his age.

The 4004 BC date may have fallen into obscurity if it hadn’t been added to the bible by a bookseller and printer, Thomas Guy. In 1675, in a simple marketing ploy to boost sales, Guy added the date into the margins of his bibles, which worked fantastically, making him a rich man. The subtle twists of fate are in fact quite breathtaking, for Thomas Guy bequeathed his fortune to Guy’s Hospital – an institution which has provided medical care for over 300 years. In 1701, the date received the official blessing of the Church of England.

The Origins of the Science of Geology

Romancing the Stone

Humankind has had an intimate association with the Earth from the first tentative footsteps of those early hominids to our current insatiable need for minerals and fossil fuels. Undoubtedly our early ancestors were aware of geological deposits, whether they were a source of flint for hand tools or clay for cave paintings or body adornment. Once the origins of the science stretch way back into the early history of man. Adobe to build dwellings or the source of ochre for cave paintings may have been the first venture into sources of materials for the use of mankind. Later stones and clay would have become important as building materials or for brick making. Certainly the ancient Egyptians were using bricks in their less ambitious constructions. And to deny that there was no understanding of the local geology when it came to the quarrying of stone for the Egyptian pyramids would have been naive indeed.

Herodotus, 484 to 426 BC, made many significant geological observations, speculating about the effect of earthquakes on landscapes, but ascribed their causes to Poseidon. Pliny the Elder (AD 23 to 79) lost his life tramping around the slopes of Vesuvius during the eruption that destroyed Pompeii. His reasoning was that earthquakes were a result of Earth’s resentment against those that mutilated and plundered her for gain. Christianity put scientific enquiry literally into the dark ages due to an all encompassing theory for the cause of everything, and besides it was thought that the Earth was a very young place, doomsday was nigh, and therefore the study of the machinations of the planet would be a pointless exercise. Inconsiderately doomsday did not arrive which got some individuals wondering about the natural world. In addition the increasing preoccupation during the Middle Ages with alchemy kick started a scientific process which continues to this day. Leonardo da Vinci, Nicholas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, brave and brilliant philosophers and scientists all, drove some of the first nails into the coffin of ignorance, holding high the light of knowledge for those who would see.

However the first real attempt on a treatise on geology was made by Scottish farmer James Hutton in an inaccessible 1795 tome titled ‘A Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations.’ He might have passed into geological obscurity if it wasn’t for a certain John Playfair who rewrote the book on Hutton’s death, making it possible for mere mortals to grasp the concepts that Hutton had so obscurely written about. At that time natural philosophers were divided into two camps – the Neptunists, who believed that everything on Earth, including sea shells on lofty peaks, were due to rising and falling sea levels, and the Plutonists, who noted that volcanoes and earthquakes continually changed the face of the planet and that seas were not the agents which the Neptunists believed. Plutonists also raised difficult questions such to the whereabouts of all the water during periods of tranquillity, a period we are experiencing now.

Hutton’s insights threw some light on the matter, thanks to his keen eye and a close identification with the land thanks to his farming background. He observed the formation of soils, and their erosion and transport to other locales. He realised that over time this erosion of the high ground and the infilling of the lows would leave a planet smooth and devoid of topography. However everywhere he looked there were hills and mountains, particularly so in his native Scotland. He realised that there had to be some process that renewed and uplifted the landscape the keep the cycle going. Those pesky fossils on the mountain tops had not been deposited by floods, but had been lifted there, along with the mountains themselves. Heat within the Earth was the driving force of all this activity, or so ran the thoughts of Mr Hutton. Interestingly some of these thoughts have only been vindicated in the last 40 years or so. More importantly however was the idea that these processes required immense periods of time – far more than anyone had as yet ever conceived.



At the same time, down south, William Smith was building canals and draining bogs for a range of clients as part of the expanding infrastructure driven by the Industrial Revolution. During his daily work he uncovered a myriad of fossils, and realised that each succeeding geological bed or formation had its own particular assemblage of preserved organisms. Spending huge amounts of time and money, he travelled widely across vast swathes of England and to some extent Scotland, mapping the various outcrops of the various strata wherever he went. His exertions damaged his health had his finances to the extent that he even spent time in a debtors gaol, and perhaps even more galling for him, his work was discounted and ridiculed by the supercilious aristocrats who had formed the Geological Society of London in 1807.


However an examination of the map that Smith produced and now hangs in the Society’s headquarters in London reveals his genius. His map shows in amazingly accurate detail the geology of the British Isles and was the first ever geological map. Singlehandedly Smith had mapped out what the British Geological Survey, with hordes of geologists and government funding, couldn’t really improve on except by adding detail. And in a true Hollywood ending, Smith was eventually accepted and then lauded by the Society, and was granted a pension in his latter years, putting off forever the spectre of a debtor's prison and a difficult retirement.


Charles Lyell then enters the stage. He had managed to wade through chunks of Hutton’s book, and was eternally grateful to Playfair for rewriting the work into something approaching readable. Lyell was the most influential geologist of his century, which was a time incidentally when the world was in thrall to all things geological. Geology was the central science and the older Royal Society was in danger of being eclipsed by the upstart Geological Society as the premier scientific society of the country, which at that time also meant the world. So popular was the science that when Charles Lyell travelled to America to lecture, 3000 people showed up to be enlightened on ponderous subjects such as marine zeolites and seismic perturbations in Campania. Back home, modern, thinking men would venture forth to do fieldwork dressed in top hats and dark suits, except for a Reverend Buckland of Oxford who preferred an academic gown. Lyell produced his masterpiece, The Principles of Geology, which built on the works of Hutton of a previous century and made his reputation. Charles Darwin carried a copy of his book on the Beagle voyage, writing afterwards “the greatest merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of one’s mind, and therefore that, when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it partially through his eyes.”

Between the time of Hutton and Lyell there arose another controversy that followed on from the great Neptunist-Plutonist debate. New lines were drawn between the Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism camps. The former adhered to the idea that the Earth was shaped by cataclysmic events – floods, mainly, while the latter camp believed that changes on Earth took place over immense periods of time. The Catastrophists found that their theory worked in well with the Noachian deluge and therefore did not fly in the face of any biblical beliefs. Lyell was a Uniformitarian and his influence remains right down to the present day. As an interesting aside however, rude Catastrophist brickbats still whizz down the passage of 2 centuries to strike at the very heart of Uniformitarian belief. These brickbats comprise meteorite impacts which are widely believed to have brought to a close the Cretaceous Period and the demise of the dinosaurs, and have been invoked as the cause of a number of other extinctions in Earth history.

Because the Brits were the most active in the early years of the science, British names were assigned to the geological time scale. The Devonian Period is named after Devon, the Cambrian after the Roman name for Wales, and the Ordovician and Silurian after ancient Welsh tribes, the Ordovices and the Silures. However other names began to creep in from practitioners elsewhere – Jurassic from the Jura Mountains of southern France, Permian from the Russian province of Perm while the Cretaceous was named by a certain J.J. d’Omalius d’ Halloy of Belgium.

Initially the geological time scale was divided into 4 spans – Primary, Secondary, Tertiary and Quaternary. The Tertiary is the last surviving member of this initial subdivision, although Quaternary does get a period outing. Lyell introduced additional units known as epochs or series to cover the period since the end of the Cretaceous. These were the Pleistocene, meaning ‘most recent’ Pliocene, the ‘more recent’, Miocene, ‘moderately recent’ and Oligocene ‘but a little recent.’ Nowadays geological time is divided into four great chunks known as eras – Precambrian, Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cainozoic, which in turn are divided into Periods which some of you may be familiar with, viz., Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. (Camels Often Sit Down Carefully Perhaps Their Joints Creak is a useful acronym for remembering them).

Romancing the Stone