1. Contested Authority
Professionalization and Popularization
in Nineteenth Century Science

2. Geology
Development of stratigraphy and mapping
Discovery of “deep time” and primeval fauna
Naturalistic explanation tied with deism

3. Scientist
Coined in William Whewell's 1834
review of Mary Somerville's On the
Connexion of the Physical Sciences
“We need very much a name to
describe a cultivator of science in
general. I should incline to call him
a Scientist. Thus we might say, that
as an Artist is a Musician, Painter, or
Poet, a Scientist is a Mathematician,
Physicist, or Naturalist.” (1840)

4. Two Episodes
The rejection of biblical literalism
by the emerging geological
community
The controversy over the 1844
publication of Vestiges of the
Natural History of Creation.

5. Allegorically
True
Literally “Simply A
True Story”
Revealed
Text

6. Chaos-Restitution
Matter & Life
Created
Fossils
Formed
4004 BCE 2348 BCE
Perhaps multiple
cataclysms and creations
6-day Edenic Noah’s Flood
Restoration (local?)

7. Thomas Chalmers
“There is a prejudice against
the speculations of the
geologists, which I am anxious
to remove. It is said that they
nurture infidel propensities …
This is a false alarm. The
writings of Moses do not fix
the antiquity of the globe.”
1804

8. Gap
Matter
Created
4004 BCE 2348 BCE
Gap of undetermined length
Life Noah’s Flood
created (local?)

9. Day-Age
Matter Life Fossils
Created Created Formed
1 2 3 4 5 6
Six “Days” of Creation
Humans Created Noah’s Flood
(local)

10. Scriptural Geologists
“Mosaic geology”
Amateurs who felt that they
were competent to comment
on the emerging body of
professional geological work.
Writing for popular audiences
They themselves interpreted
and modified scripture

11. Hugh Miller
on the “anti-geologists”
“It need not surprise us that a
writer who takes such strange
liberties with a book which he
professes to respect, and which he
must have had many opportunities
of knowing, should take still
greater liberties with a science for
which he entertains no respect
whatever, and of whose first
principles he is palpably ignorant.”

12. 1. Granville Penn (1761–1844) 13. Frederick Nolan (1784–1864)
2. George Bugg (1769–1851) 14. William Martin (1772–1851)
3. Andrew Ure (1778–1857) 15. Sharon Turner (n.d.)
4. Henry Cole (1792–1858) 16. Joseph Sutcliffe (n.d.)
5. Thomas Gisbourne (1758–1846) 17. William Kirby (1759–1850)
6. Samuel Best (1802–73) 18. William Brande (1788–1866)
7. James Mellor Brown (1796–1867) 19. William Martin (1772–1851)
8. Fowler de Johnsone (n.d.) 20. Walter Foreman (n.d.)
9. George Young (1777–1848) 21. Robert Fitzroy (1805–65)
10. George Fairholme (1789–1846) 22. John Murray (1786–1851)
11. William Rhind (1797–1874) 23. Thomas Rodd (1763 - 1822)
12. William Cockburn (1773–1858) 24. James Rennie (1787 - 1867)

13. George Bugg
“Geology cannot possibly exist consistently with
a fair and literal construction of the Word of
God” and so contradicts “the plainest dictates of
common sense”
“I ardently hope, however, that we shall .. value
more our Bible and its plain and obvious
instruction ... and ‘meddle not with them that are
given to change’.”

14. Major Objections
Evidence for “catastrophic” change
Problems with accurately dating strata
Presence of human remains in “old” strata
Geology was prone to “over-theorizing”

15. Hugh Miller
on the “anti-geologists”
“The follies of the present day are
transcripts, unwittingly produced,
and with of course a few
variations, of follies which existed
centuries ago; and it seems to be
… that scarce an explanation of
geologic phenomena has been given
by the anti-geologists of our own
times, that was not anticipated by
writers of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.”

16. Concern
If the earth was populated
prior to the Edenic creation,
then there must have been
death.
If there was death, then
biblical themes of original sin
and redemption through the
sacrifice of Christ were called
into question.

17. James Mellor-Brown
Denial of the global flood by Buckland “affords
another illustration of men who pull down the
bulwark, but disclaim any intention of
endangering the citadel. The Trojan Horse,
drawn within the walls of the devoted city by
friendly hands, is a standing emblem of men
acting under the unsuspecting guidance of the
Evil One.”

18. Gideon Mantell
Need to “silence the idle
clamours that have been
raised against geological
speculations, from their
supposed tendency to
skepticism.”

19. Lyell
“We cannot sufficiently depreciate the interference of a
certain class of writers … While they denounce as
heterodox the current opinions of geologists, with respect
to the high antiquity of the earth and of certain class of
organic beings, they do no scruple to promulgate theories
concerning the creation and the deluge, derived from their
own expositions of the sacred text, in which they endeavour
to point out the accordance of the Mosaic history with
phenomena which they have never studied, and to judge of
which every page of their writings proves their consummate
incompetence.” (1827)

20. Geological Society
Formed in 1807
A hierarchical
metropolitan group that
relied on the expertise
of provincial workers.

21. Adam Sedgwick
“[T]he goodly pile, gentlemen, which many of
you have helped to rear, after years of labour, has
been pulled down and reconstructed; but with
such unskilful [sic] hands that its inscriptions are
turned upside down; its sculptured figures have
their heads to the ground, and their heels to the
heavens; and the whole fabric, amid the fantastic
ornaments by which it is degraded, has lost the
beauty and the harmony of its old proportions.”

22. Discourse on the Studies of the
University
Science was the decipherment of the records of creation
All parts of the universe are “knit together by the
operation of a common law” which offers proof of
“beauty, and harmony, and order”
This in turn yields to the argument from design and the
Designer - a proof “so strong that it never has been and
never can be gainsaid”
Transmutation was “a theory no better than a phrenzied
dream”

23. Sedgwick on Literalism
Conflicts between science and religion were not to be
solved by “shifting and shuffling the solid strata of the
earth, or dealing them out in such as way as to play the
game of an ignorant and dishonest hypothesis - not by
shutting our eyes to the facts, or denying the evidence
of our senses; but by patient investigation carried out
in the sincere love of truth and by learning to reject
every consequence not warranted by direct physical
evidence.”

24. Against Scriptural Geologists
“Who is the greatest
unbeliever? Is it not the man
who, professing to hold that
this book [the Bible] contains
the Word of God, is afraid to
look into the other volume,
lest it should contradict it?'

25. Against Scriptural Geologists
“[T]o confound the ground-
works of philosophy and
religion is to ruin the
superstructure of both

33. British Association for
the Advancement of Science
Founded in 1831
Formed against elitism of Royal
Society of London
Bringing science to the people
outside London
Attacked by William Cockburn
and others as theologically
unsound.

34. Scriptural Geologists
The reaction of the scriptural geologists was “in
part a cultural [one] to the social and cognitive
exclusion of all but self-styled experts from an
area of speculation that, in the heyday of
theories of the earth, had been open to all.”
Martin Rudwick

35. Scriptural Geologists
“[L]argely pre-professionals or members of the
older professions – classically educated and
genteel laymen, versed in polite literature;
clergymen, linguists, and antiquaries – those, in
general, with vested interests in mediating the
meaning of books, rather than rocks, in
churches and classrooms.”
James Moore

40. Geology
‘When I need to know what a rock is, I go to
it. I hammer it; I dissect it. I then know what it
really is’ (Robert Dick)
‘A man, to be a true geologist, must have a body
as well as a soul. No mincing town-dandy or
sickly bookworm is likely to thrive in the
profession.’ (Edward Forbes)

41. Robert Bakewell
“Geology discovers to us proofs of the awful
revolutions which have in former ages changed
the surface of the globe, and overwhelmed all
its inhabitants: it reveals to us the forms of
strange and unknown animals and unfolds the
might and skill of creative energy, displayed in
the ancient world: indeed, there is no science
which presents objects that so powerfully
excite our admiration and astonishment.”

42. By1850, geology was being
characterized as a practical,
specialized, active, ‘masculine’
endeavor that was amenable to
Christianity.