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Taken from The Recusant - Issue 55 [Eastertide 2021]

What Is Uniformitarianism?

Let us turn to the anti-creationist ‘hostile witnesses’ Wikipedia and National Geographic for our evidence, in the hope that it will be less easily dismissed (emphases ours throughout).


Quote:“ ‘Theory of the Earth’ was a publication by James Hutton which laid the foundations for geology. In it he showed [!?] that the Earth is the product of natural forces. What could be seen happening today, over long periods of time, could produce what we see in the rocks. It also hypothesized that the age of the Earth was much older than what biblical literalists claim. This idea, uniformitarianism, was used by Charles Lyell in his work, and Lyell’s textbook was an important influence on Charles Darwin.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_Earth)


Quote:“ ‘Principles of Geology: being an attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth's surface, by reference to causes now in operation’ is a book by the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell that was first published in 3 volumes from 1830 - 1833 … The book established Lyell’s credentials as an important geological theorist and popularized the doctrine of uniformitarianism (first suggested by James Hutton in ‘Theory of the Earth’ published in 1795).

The book is notable for being one of the first to use the term ‘evolution’ in the context of biological speciation. In Lyell’s work, he described the three rules he believes to cause the steady change of the Earth. The first rule is that geologic change comes from slow and continual procedures that have been happening over a long period of time. This rule is the basic ideal of Uniformitarianism […] Lyell’s interpretation of geologic change as the steady accumulation of minute changes over enormously long spans of time, a central theme in the Principles, influenced the 22-year-old Charles Darwin, who was given the first volume of the first edition by Robert FitzRoy, captain of HMS Beagle, just before they set out (December 1831) on the ship’s second voyage. […] 

Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology was met with a lot of criticism when it was first published. The main argument against Lyell is that he took an a priori approach in his work. This means that Lyell was pulling from a theoretical idea instead of pulling from empirical evidence to explain what was occurring in the geological world. One opponent of Principles of Geology [on] this point was Adam Sedgwick [who argued] that the evidence of geologic events points to a catastrophic event.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Geology)


Quote:“The principle of uniformitarianism is essential to understanding Earth’s history. However, prior to 1830, uniformitarianism was not the prevailing theory. […] Among the scientists who agreed with Hutton was Charles Lyell. […] The combined efforts of Lyell and Hutton became the foundation of modern geology. Charles Darwin, the founder of evolutionary biology, looked at uniformitarianism as support for his theory of how new species emerge. The evolution of life, he realized, required vast amounts of time, and the science of geology now showed Earth was extremely old.”(https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyc...itarianism)
Continued from The Recusant Issue 55


Is Uniformitarianism Catholic?

Fourth Lateran Council:
“We firmly believe and we confess simply that the true God…by His own omnipotent power at once from the beginning of time created each creature from nothing…” (Dz. 428)


First Vatican Council:
“This sole true God ‘immediately from the beginning of time fashioned each creature, spiritual and corporeal, out of nothing’ […]” (Dz. 1783)


The Catechism of the Council of Trent
“ ‘CREATOR OF HEAVEN AND EARTH.’ The necessity of having previously imparted to the faithful a knowledge of the omnipotence of God, will appear from what we are now about to made the explain with regard to the creation of the world. For when already convinced of the omnipotence of the Creator, we more readily believe the wondrous production of so stupendous a work. For God formed not the world from materials of any sort, but created it from nothing, and that not by constraint or necessity, but spontaneously, and of his own free will. … with infinite wisdom and power, attributes peculiar to the Divinity, [He] created all things in the beginning: ‘He spoke and they were made, He commanded and they were created.’ (Ps. XXXII, 9; CXLVIII, 5)  […]

By referring to the sacred history of Genesis the pastor will make himself familiar with these things for the instruction of the faithful.” [“Catechism of the Council of Trent”, Rev. J Donovan, Baltimore, 1829 - p.29 ff. “On the First Article of the Creed” ]


Sacred Scripture:
“Behold this second epistle I write to you, my dearly beloved, in which I stir up by way of admonition your sincere mind: That you may be mindful of those words which I told you before from the holy prophets, and of your apostles, of the precepts of the Lord and Saviour. Knowing this first, that in the last days there shall come deceitful scoffers, walking after their own lusts, saying: Where is his promise or his coming? for since the time that the fathers slept, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.”
[...venient in novissimis diebus in deceptione illusores … dicentes: ubi est promissio, aut adventus eius? ex quo enim patres dormierunt, omnia sic perseverant ab initio creaturae.]
(2 Peter 3:1-4)

“And the flood was forty days upon the earth, and the waters increased, and lifted up the ark on high from the earth. For they overflowed exceedingly: and filled all on the face of the earth: and the ark was carried upon the waters. And the waters prevailed beyond measure upon the earth: and all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered. The water was fifteen cubits higher than the mountains which it covered.”
[“...et aquae praevaluerunt nimis super terram: opertique sunt omnes montes excelsi sub universo caelo. Quindecim cubitis altior fuit aqua super montes, quos operuerat.”] 
(Gen. 7:17-20)
Continued from The Recusant - Issue 55

Charles Lyell - the man who “freed” science from Moses!

“I am sorry to have to inform you,” wrote Darwin in a letter to a Mr. Frederick McDermott dated 1880, shortly before his death, a letter which would afterwards become known as ‘the
atheist letter’ - “that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the son of God.”

When he set sail on the three year voyage of HMS Beagle, the young Charles Darwin took with him a copy of Lyell’s newly published ‘Principles of Geology’ by the hitherto little known amateur geologist Charles Lyell. In his autobiography Darwin describes how he began the voyage a God-fearing Protestant and had originally intended to become a country parson, but that as he read Lyell’s book his believe in God gradually evaporated until he no longer believed. So, what do we know of this author and his work which had such an important
impact on the thinking of Darwin?

In 1829, shortly before the publication of the first volume of Principles, Lyell wrote a letter to fellow a old-earth geologist, Roderick Murchison, in which he says:
Quote:“I trust I shall make my sketch of the progress of geology popular. Old [Rev. John] Fleming is frightened and thinks the age [in which we live] will not stand my anti-Mosaical
conclusions and at least that the subject will for a time become unpopular and awkward for the clergy, but I am not afraid. I shall out with the whole but in as conciliatory a manner as
possible.” (‘The Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell’, (Mrs.) K.M. Lyell (ed.). John Murray, London:1881. Vol.1, p.271)


By mid-1830, in a letter to another confederate, George Poulett Scrope, we find Lyell telling him that he hopes his contribution to Quarterly Review will help to “free the science from
Moses.” He then goes on to discuss tactics for getting as many of his Bible-believing contemporaries, particularly Anglican ‘clergy’, to accept his new ideas. Don’t rub their faces in it and
reminded them about how they were wrong, he says, but praise them for being liberal and progressive and more of them will fall into line:
“If we don’t irritate, which I fear that we may (though mere history), we shall carry all with us. If you don’t triumph over them, but compliment the liberality and candour of the present
Quote:age, the bishops and enlightened saints will join us in despising both the ancient and modern physico-theologians. It is just the time to strike…” (Ibid.)

‘Physico-theologians’ appears to be a contemptuous term of his own invention, one which he uses throughout his book to describe any scientist of his own day or earlier who believed the
scriptures (and Genesis in particular). For example: 
Quote:“I return with pleasure to the geologists of Italy… They refuted and ridiculed the physicotheological systems of Burnet, Whiston and Woodward…” (Principles of Geology, vol.2, p.33)

It is difficult to show the general tone of a book through quotation: it is present throughout, just under the surface, but one does not need to read many pages to gain a fairly accurate idea.

Lyell is generally scathing and contemptuous of anything connected to religion, and references to “Jerome” or to “a Carmelitan[sic] friar” and so forth are found throughout the section
of his work in which he pretends to present a history of science in the centuries leading up to his own. His open admiration for any “scientist” who did not believe the scriptures is matched
only by his alarmingly dismissive and condescending attitude towards those who:
Quote:“...subscribe to the position that all marine organic remains were proofs of the Mosaic deluge… Under the influence of such prejudices, three centuries were of as little avail as a few years in our own times, when we are no longer required to propel the vessel against the force of an adverse current.” (Ibid. p.25)

For “vessel” read “science” (though in reality it might as well mean “atheism”), for “force of an adverse current” read “influence of the Church.” In his letters, Lyell likewise refers
contemptuously to “Moses and his penal deluge” as having held back progress (in his letter to Murchison, 22nd Jan 1829, for instance). Even the secular scientists and academics of our own day have had no difficulty in recognising what sort of a man Charles Lyell was and what really motivated him:
Quote:“For, true or false, fair or unfair, Lyell’s autobiographical vision of himself as the spiritual saviour of geology, freeing the science from the old dispensation of Moses, has exercised an unbroken fascination over almost all who have struggled to unravel the history of British geology.” (‘British Journal for the History of Science,’ Vol.9, No.2, Lyell Centenary Issue, Cambridge University Press, 1975 - see: www.jstor.org/stable/4025798?seq=1)

Not surprisingly, Lyell, like Hutton before him, was neither a ‘Christian’ even in the broadest sense, nor a believer in the scriptures. He is usually referred to as a deist, although in the
Scotland of 200 years ago that is perhaps the closest equivalent of a present-day atheist:
Quote:“In his religious views, Lyell was essentially a deist, holding the position that God had originally created the world and life on it, and then had allowed nature to operate according to its own (God-given) natural laws, rather than constantly intervening to direct and shape the course of all history.” (‘The Young Charles Darwin,’ Keith Stewart Thomson, Yale University Press 2009, p.109)

Like Darwin, Lyell had no formal training in the science he was propounding and was only a wealthy amateur. But the link between the two men goes much further. Charles Lyell was the
man whose book Charles Darwin took aboard HMS Beagle and read during the three year voyage, the thing which, Darwin says, caused him to doubt the existence of God and turned him into an unbeliever by the time the voyage ended. Following his return from the voyage in 1836, Lyell befriended Darwin; over the years that followed he continually urged Darwin to publish his ideas on human origins and he used his influence to persuade the London publisher John Murray to publish Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. All in all, Charles Lyell seems to have had a significant impact on the man who later would take credit for what we now call the theory of evolution. What’s more, although not exactly the father of  uniformitarianism (since he developed the ideas of James Hutton), he is arguably the man who managed to make the idea ‘mainstream,’ who gave the world the notion that the earth is very old and the biblical flood a mere myth, and who did so, in his own words, as a means of freeing science from Moses.

Evolutionists and old-earthers will point to fossils as “evidence.” Where they appear to go wrong, it seems, is in conflating the evidence with their interpretation of the evidence. For
instance, that fossils exist is a fact. That they constitute a “record” is an interpretation. That different layers of rock can be found is a fact; that each one was laid down very slowly over
millions of years is an interpretation. Our interpretation of those same facts is that Noah’s flood did it all in one go. The battle begun in Hutton and Lyell’s day is still raging today. Let
us conclude by saying that present-day proponents of an old earth and the consequent denial of Noah’s flood (and yes, saying that the flood didn’t cover all the earth is really a denial,
since that is not the flood found in Genesis!), whether they realise it or not, are promoting uniformitarianism and perpetuating the legacy of Charles Lyell. Fr. Robinson, that means you.