I just finished reading a biography of James Hutton, "The Man Who Found Time." Unless you're a geologist, you probably don't know who James Hutton is (I didn't before I read the book). But his discoveries profoundly changed how we think about the world and our place in it.
This won't really be a traditional book review; I'm not going to summarize the book and I'm not really going to critique it. All I'll say is, I really enjoyed it and it was a great refresher on the Scottish Enlightenment and the amazing ideas that came out of it that continue to shape the way we think.
James Hutton is the man who dared to defy conventional wisdom that the Earth was 6,000 years old. Yes, I know some people still believe that today, but just over 200 years ago everyone believed this, especially some of the most learned scholars in the world. They tried to explain the geology around them by using the flood and assuming that the great catastrophe of the flood and the waters receding back left everything that we see now.
Hutton's major breakthrough was realizing that rocks form all the time. As debris is eroded off of old rocks, it can gather at the bottom of a body of water, and over time enough pressure builds to turn the eroded material into new rock. This rock can then be lifted above the sea level by geological processes, which explains many of the formations he saw around him. The key here is that he realized that the process of erosion would take a very, very long time, meaning that for new rock to be formed, the Earth had to be extremely old. He didn't put a number on it, but he realized it was much more than 6,000 years old.
I think Hutton's discovery and story are incredible for two reasons. The first is that it's something that is relatively obvious in hindsight. Hutton's discovery required no advanced geological background; in fact, geology as a field didn't exist yet. He was a chemist, which certainly helped, but the things he saw could have been identified much earlier. Are there any problems like that today, where something is blatantly obvious once it's figured out, but it takes a veritable genius to crack the code? I think it happens fairly regularly on the scale of small problems, but what about big problems. If anyone knows of something like this let me know :)
The second thing that really struck me about this story was the intense backlash Hutton received for this theory. The standard church doctrine was that the Earth was 6,000 years old, and no one really wants to go against that. I suppose we see hints of that today with so many people refusing to believe in an Earth that's older than 6,000 years old, but in Hutton's time the backlash came from fellow scientists. I've heard similar stories about this happening in science today, but rarely does it last someone's entire life like it did for Hutton.
Reading this book made me glad that I'm a member of a church that respects science. The church doesn't have an official stance on the age of the Earth or evolution, leaving room for science to do its job. And this makes sense. The church's job is to bring the gospel to people, not force scientific ideas on people. The church (and of course, God) care much more about our spirituality and whether we're keeping our covenants than whether or not we adopt a literal interpretation of the biblical creation story. Learning about science is encouraged, and is something that can help us later in the eternities.
This won't really be a traditional book review; I'm not going to summarize the book and I'm not really going to critique it. All I'll say is, I really enjoyed it and it was a great refresher on the Scottish Enlightenment and the amazing ideas that came out of it that continue to shape the way we think.
James Hutton is the man who dared to defy conventional wisdom that the Earth was 6,000 years old. Yes, I know some people still believe that today, but just over 200 years ago everyone believed this, especially some of the most learned scholars in the world. They tried to explain the geology around them by using the flood and assuming that the great catastrophe of the flood and the waters receding back left everything that we see now.
Hutton's major breakthrough was realizing that rocks form all the time. As debris is eroded off of old rocks, it can gather at the bottom of a body of water, and over time enough pressure builds to turn the eroded material into new rock. This rock can then be lifted above the sea level by geological processes, which explains many of the formations he saw around him. The key here is that he realized that the process of erosion would take a very, very long time, meaning that for new rock to be formed, the Earth had to be extremely old. He didn't put a number on it, but he realized it was much more than 6,000 years old.
I think Hutton's discovery and story are incredible for two reasons. The first is that it's something that is relatively obvious in hindsight. Hutton's discovery required no advanced geological background; in fact, geology as a field didn't exist yet. He was a chemist, which certainly helped, but the things he saw could have been identified much earlier. Are there any problems like that today, where something is blatantly obvious once it's figured out, but it takes a veritable genius to crack the code? I think it happens fairly regularly on the scale of small problems, but what about big problems. If anyone knows of something like this let me know :)
The second thing that really struck me about this story was the intense backlash Hutton received for this theory. The standard church doctrine was that the Earth was 6,000 years old, and no one really wants to go against that. I suppose we see hints of that today with so many people refusing to believe in an Earth that's older than 6,000 years old, but in Hutton's time the backlash came from fellow scientists. I've heard similar stories about this happening in science today, but rarely does it last someone's entire life like it did for Hutton.
Reading this book made me glad that I'm a member of a church that respects science. The church doesn't have an official stance on the age of the Earth or evolution, leaving room for science to do its job. And this makes sense. The church's job is to bring the gospel to people, not force scientific ideas on people. The church (and of course, God) care much more about our spirituality and whether we're keeping our covenants than whether or not we adopt a literal interpretation of the biblical creation story. Learning about science is encouraged, and is something that can help us later in the eternities.
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