The Jurassic Coast, England
Until 1790, everyone knew that the earth was 4004 years old.
Everyone.
Exactly 4004 years.
This was not a religious dogma subscribed to by a few school boards in Texas, this was then accepted as a scientific fact.
In the course of things, this is not so long ago. The men who wrote the Constitution of the United States, for example, all believed the earth to be 4004 years old.
Then, in 1790, James Hutton, a Scottish doctor and naturalist, changed our view of the world forever.
Yesterday, we spent the day walking along the Jurassic Coast in the south of England. (see above). We brought with us a small hammer so that we could hunt for fossils. The coast here is littered with them. It’s also dominated by massive white chalk cliffs. The geology here stares you in the face.
For thousands of years (eons, in fact) it has stared everyone in the face. Walking along the beaches and cliffs of Dorset you can clearly see the folds of granite and sandstone as the earth was pushed and shoved and uplifted again and again. High in the cliff faces are fossils of marine life, now lifted hundreds of feet from sea level. How did they get there?
In the 1780s, James Hutton saw the same things.
Until then, people had explained the presence of fossils as the remnants of those creatures who had not survived Noah’s flood. They explained the presence of sea shells hundreds of feet above the sea as evidence of how great the Great Flood had been.
Hutton was the Darwin of Geology. He invented the science. Observing and recording the world around him, and equally obvious to everyone else, he published his Theory of the Earth, in which he postulated that in fact, the earth was not 4004 years old, but perhaps ‘several million’. (The earth is, in fact, 4.54 billion years old, at least by present count).
Hutton’s work was radical for its day. Very radical.
He was publicly excoriated as a athiest or a madman.
He was overturning established thought and science that had been the bedrock (so to speak) of common and scientific thinking for generations. Forever.
It was, to say the least, upsetting to many.
Yet Hutton was right. Ironically, he didn’t make his discovery peering into a microscope seeing things no one else had ever seen – he made his discoveries and drew his conclusions seeing things that everyone else saw every day. He just understood, before anyone else, what it was we were all looking at.
In a 1788 paper he presented at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Hutton remarked, “we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”
Hutton went on to completely change the way in which we saw the world, and our own sense of time. He invented the science of Geology and also the science of Meteorology. And he had a great deal of influence. One of the early readers of Theory of the Earth was a young naturalist, just starting his career named Charles Darwin.
Sometimes the facts that everyone knows and everyone believes are not necessarily the truth.
Sometimes the answer has always been right before your eyes.
