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Where Did Billions of Years Come From?
3MI Newsletter from August 12th, 2024
Click below to listen to an audio recording of the article.
If you ever wondered where the notion originated that the earth is millions, billions, maybe even trillions of years old, you need look no further than James Hutton (1726-1797), farmer and examiner of rock formations, who has been dubbed the Father of Modern Geology, and who maintained
"...with respect to human observation, this world has neither a beginning nor an end."
"James Hutton, 1726 - 1797, Geologist" by Sir Henry Raeburn, 1776
The book, The Man Who Found Time by Jack Repcheck, provides an unapologetically favorable account of Hutton's life, how he came up with his hypothesis of an ancient earth, the cultural and intellectual milieu in Scotland at the time, and the impact his hypothesis had on the Rationalist philosophers and scientists of his day.
"Hutton's theory was deeply upsetting on two counts. First, it questioned the veracity of the Bible, and second, it displaced humans from close to the start of time."[1]
He reached the conclusion of an ancient earth by discarding the Biblical timetable of approximately 6,000 years and imagining that two processes, erosion and the movements of the forces beneath the oceans, are uniform and occur very slowly over countless years. The author admits that scientists, at that time called "natural philosophers," who held to a creation that occurred approximately 4,000 B.C. were the nearly unanimous majority, and the view was held by most scholars and
"many of the holiest figures from church history, including the prophet Elijah, St. Augustine, St. Bede, St. Thomas Aquinas, and even Martin Luther, had commented on the age of the earth and all had reached the same conclusion: the earth was nearly 6,000 years old."[2]
"St Thomas Aquinas & St Augustine of Hippo" Lake Titicaca workshop, c. 1730
The ancient age theory eventually had a major impact on the Rationalists of the time, especially those who were looking to eliminate a Divine Creator through mindless evolution. Hutton's hypothesis had been made popular by Charles Lyell in his book The Principles of Geology, which Darwin read while he was touring the world on the Beagle. Until then, Darwin, though an atheist, still believed in a young earth. But that view changed radically after he read Lyell's book.
"Charles Darwin, writing seventy years after Hutton, took the concept of the divine away from man altogether. Darwin's thesis was that far from having been created miraculously by God, the species Homo sapiens was simply descended from an ancestor shared with the common ape. No divine intervention was needed."[3]
The author even admits,
"If Darwin had not been jolted by Hutton and Lyell into appreciating the age of the earth, it is arguable that he would not have deduced the theory of evolution."[4]
Hutton came up with his hypothesis by studying rocks near his farm in Edinburgh, Scotland. He noticed how some areas were pushed up from below but lifted layers that contained various fossils which appeared to be unaffected, and which he assumed must have been laid down over many thousands of years. From that, he concluded that volcanic activity from beneath the earth continually and slowly pushed ancient layers of sediment to the surface which, to him, meant the earth had to be extremely ancient.
He assumed that all processes were uniform and that erosion and volcanic motion were the mechanisms, and that erosion had taken great lengths of time as it seems to today. He believed that this process of erosion is what creates the rocks, and that heat inside the earth causes them to rise to the surface, a process which is cyclical and must occur over the course of long ages. He claimed that his hypothesis was "irrefutable proof" of a world that was untold ages old. Until then, the age of the earth, accepted by both secular and religious scholars, was about six-thousand years.
Of course the irony was that the rock formations Hutton studied were exposed by catastrophic erosion events such as the "Gutted Haddie" where a sudden collapse of an outcropping after horrific rain revealed the strata of rocks and fossils making them visible for him to study. A more careful scientist might have realized that erosion was not necessarily the slow, uniform process Hutton had assumed.
[1] The Man Who Found Time, Jack Repcheck, Perseus Publishing, c. 2003, p. 4
[2] Ibid. p. 5-6
[3] Ibid. p. 6
[4] Ibid. p. 7
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