.png)
Where Did Billions of Years Come From?
3MI Newsletter from August 23rd, 2024
Click below to listen to an audio recording of the article.
The author shows what a radical departure was Hutton's ancient earth hypothesis and that it was a rebellion against religious orthodoxy.
"Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin are regarded as the key figures in the freeing of science from the straightjacket of religious orthodoxy. But James Hutton must be counted among them. Biblical scholars had proved generation after generation that the first day of Creation occurred in approximately 4000 B.C."[1]
Atheists make the connection of Darwin and Galileo- why not Catholics?
Further on, Repcheck, trying to justify Hutton, attempts to debunk the Christian Age of the world by pretending it was a human invention beginning with Julius Africanus (born A.D. 160).
"In fact, his real purpose was to give context to biblical prophesy. He was most concerned with predicting the second coming of Christ, the thousand-year reign described in the Book of Revelation, the last book of the new Testament.... Julius was merely the first to put into writing what was a long-held popular belief."[2]
One of the many contributions of Julius Africanus
The author says that Julius's calculations endorsed what was already held by Eusebius and would be the benchmark for future chronologists and fully accepted by St. Jerome when he translated the Bible. It is clear that Repcheck has no understanding of, nor appreciation for Church teaching and dogmas which require the faithful to accept the lesser age. His only appreciation is for those who overthrew what the Church has held.
Hutton was an obscure farmer. How did it happen that he was encouraged in overthrowing the wisdom of the ages? The area of Scotland where Hutton, a Deist, lived had been recently cleared of all Jacobites, supporters of Catholic King Charles of England, a descendant of James II, who had failed in his attempt to reclaim the throne for his family. Thus, the intellectual atmosphere was now virtually free of Catholic thought and influence. In its place were liberal Presbyterianism, atheism, Freemasonry, deism and rationalism, a mixture which became known as the "Scottish Enlightenment."
In this milieu, men like David Hume, Adam Smith, James Hutton, John Playfair, and many other budding scientists and Rationalist philosophers could develop new ideas and exchange them freely without any prospect of interference from the Catholic Church.
"Hutton was an integral part of what is now recognized as one of the most creative periods in intellectual history. Starting around 1750, a small group of academics, amateur scholars, government officials, clergymen, and inventors, all about the same age and all centered around Scotland's capital, Edinburgh, made broad and seminal contributions to western collective knowledge within essentially one generation. This flowering of philosophical, economic, historical, and especially scientific work is now known as the Scottish Enlightenment."[3]
The pioneers of the Scottish so-called Enlightenment
The Royal Society of Edinburgh was founded in May 1789. It was the merging of the Philosophical Society with parts of the university of Edinburgh
"...to encourage and disseminate outstanding scholarship in the sciences, philosophy, history, and literature. Nearly all of the sixty fellows of the Philosophical Society became the founding fellows of the Royal Society. The roster was a 'who's who' of the [Scottish] Enlightenment: Black, Smith, Cullen, Ferguson, Robertson, Robison, Colin Maclurain's son John, and, of course, Hutton."[4]
The Royal Society of Edinburgh persists to this day
In short, he was surrounded with the movers and shakers of the secular intellectuals of the time, which consisted mainly of atheists, deists, agnostics and rationalists.
In 1784, Hutton was invited to present two lectures on his theory of an ancient earth. His hypothesis was opposed, debated, and argued by the likes of Lord Kelvin, who felt the world was 20 million years old but that it was continually cooling and who disagreed with Hutton that it was warming from the inner core. For a time,
"twenty million became the new 6,000...."[5]
Portrait of Lord Kelvin with instruments by E Goodwyn Lewis ref. OPC 2/041
But the cat was out of the bag with the acceptance of millions of years rather than thousands. Now, no length of time was too much. What difference was a few millions or billions of years one way or another, for as Hutton said from the start,
"...with respect to human observation, this world has neither a beginning nor an end."[6]
Continued in Part III
[1] The Man Who Found Time, Jack Repcheck, Perseus Publishing, c. 2003, p. 5
[2] Ibid. p. 35-36
[3] Ibid. p. 8-9
[4] Ibid. p. 143
[5] Ibid. p. 202
[6] Ibid. p. 152-53
Comments