James Hutton & Siccar Point

Siccar Point (photo by Ian Leitch)

Unmasking a long-age icon

A Scottish site, revered by evolutionary geologists worldwide as the birthplace of their long-age philosophy, actually gives powerful evidence for the Genesis Flood.

by Tas Walker (2004)

     A rocky peninsula near Cockburnspath, 60 km (40 miles) east of Edinburgh, Scotland, has become something of a ‘Mecca’ for modern geologists. According to one geology professor, the first thing you notice about Siccar Point is that it is covered with geology students. This is understandable because the site features regularly in geological literature as an icon of ‘deep time’.
     Atop the grassy cliffs, pilgrims enjoy a bird’s-eye view before descending the steep, treacherous path to the rocky point at shore level. This has been called the birthplace of modern geology, where James Hutton supposedly ‘obtained his revelation’ that the earth was not made in six days some six thousand years ago, but was unimaginably old.
     Some have placed Hutton alongside Darwin as one whose ideas shattered the biblically-rooted picture of the earth, and separated western thinking from its Christian foundation. Indeed, Hutton’s ideas inspired Darwin and gave him the eons of time he needed for his theory of evolution.

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The man who made the wedge: James Hutton and the overthrow of biblical authority

A review of The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth’s Antiquity by Jack Repcheck
Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, MA, 2003

by Tas Walker (2009)

      This biography paints James Hutton’s life in stunning detail against the background of his Scottish culture. Most people today have not heard of Hutton, but scientists call him ‘the father of modern geology’. Repcheck ranks him as one of the four outstanding pioneers of science in the last 500 years whose concepts have revolutionized Western thinking.
      The other three are Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin—all household names. Hutton never achieved the same recognition, yet his ideas profoundly changed the way modern people look at the world. Like a wedge, his ideas have split the connection between science and its Christian foundation.
      The details of Hutton’s life are engrossing. So is Repcheck’s tour of 17^th century Edinburgh. I enjoyed reading about the political turmoil, the armies, the battles and the intellectual environment of the time.
      By including personal anecdotes, Repcheck warms our hearts. His style is so arresting and the atmosphere so enticing that we can unwittingly drop our guard and accept Hutton’s ideas without rigorously assessing them. However, science should not be about feelings, but about logical arguments.

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St Hutton’s Hagiography
by John Reed (2008)

     One of the ironies of secular geology is that the same people who claim to accurately report historical events billions of years in the past have a hard time doing the same over a few decades or centuries. This is illustrated by the recurring myths surrounding one of the founding fathers of modern geology, James Hutton—myths that began shortly after his death. Aspiring geologists are taught that Hutton was a bold empiricist and rational thinker, who cast aside biblical superstition, conceived of uniformitarianism, ‘saw’ deep time in outcrops, and thus fathered the science of geology. His genius was unappreciated until Charles Lyell ‘rediscovered’ his work and finished the fight to cast off the shackles of Christianity. But this heroic saga falls far short of historical reality; so much so that cynical students of history might be tempted to label it propaganda. Geologists got this story wrong for nearly two centuries, giving us yet another reason to question their credibility as the caretakers of a much more obscure past.

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Arduino’s sketch (1758) of the Secondary formations overlying the Primaries (far left) of the Alpine foothills in the Val d’Agno of northern Italy.

Three early arguments for deep time
—part 3: the ‘geognostic pile’
by John K. Reed and Michael J. Oard

     Of the three primary original arguments advanced for deep time in the 18th century, only one—the time needed to form the sedimentary rock record—is still advanced, even though it is a weaker argument than most think. It initially focused on the volume of the ‘Secondary’ sedimentary rocks, but grew to include a variety of sedimentary features accepted as age indicators of deep time. The argument from the volume of the sedimentary record is clearly false and many of the various ‘age indicators’ are explicable using a Genesis Flood model. Furthermore, indicators of rapid sedimentation present problems for secular geology. Since the other two primary original arguments for deep time—the time needed for valley erosion and for volcanic accumulation—are demonstrably invalid, it appears that none of the original arguments carries evidential weight. The failure of earth scientists from the 18th century to the present to objectively evaluate deep time violates evidentiary logic and strongly suggests that the empirical arguments were (and continue to be) ad hoc justifications of a belief system. Deep time is better understood as a presupposition of secular natural history, not an empirical conclusion.

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