Continued from
The Recusant - Issue 55
Charles Lyell - the man who “freed” science from Moses!
“I am sorry to have to inform you,” wrote Darwin in a letter to a Mr. Frederick McDermott dated 1880, shortly before his death, a letter which would afterwards become known as ‘the
atheist letter’ - “that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the son of God.”
When he set sail on the three year voyage of HMS Beagle, the young Charles Darwin took with him a copy of Lyell’s newly published ‘
Principles of Geology’ by the hitherto little known amateur geologist Charles Lyell. In his autobiography Darwin describes how he began the voyage a God-fearing Protestant and had originally intended to become a country parson, but that as he read Lyell’s book his believe in God gradually evaporated until he no longer believed. So, what do we know of this author and his work which had such an important
impact on the thinking of Darwin?
In 1829, shortly before the publication of the first volume of
Principles, Lyell wrote a letter to fellow a old-earth geologist, Roderick Murchison, in which he says:
Quote:“I trust I shall make my sketch of the progress of geology popular. Old [Rev. John] Fleming is frightened and thinks the age [in which we live] will not stand my anti-Mosaical
conclusions and at least that the subject will for a time become unpopular and awkward for the clergy, but I am not afraid. I shall out with the whole but in as conciliatory a manner as
possible.” (‘The Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell’, (Mrs.) K.M. Lyell (ed.). John Murray, London:1881. Vol.1, p.271)
By mid-1830, in a letter to another confederate, George Poulett Scrope, we find Lyell telling him that he hopes his contribution to Quarterly Review will help to “free the science from
Moses.” He then goes on to discuss tactics for getting as many of his Bible-believing contemporaries, particularly Anglican ‘clergy’, to accept his new ideas. Don’t rub their faces in it and
reminded them about how they were wrong, he says, but praise them for being liberal and progressive and more of them will fall into line:
“If we don’t irritate, which I fear that we may (though mere history), we shall carry all with us. If you don’t triumph over them, but compliment the liberality and candour of the present
Quote:age, the bishops and enlightened saints will join us in despising both the ancient and modern physico-theologians. It is just the time to strike…” (Ibid.)
‘Physico-theologians’ appears to be a contemptuous term of his own invention, one which he uses throughout his book to describe any scientist of his own day or earlier who believed the
scriptures (and Genesis in particular). For example:
Quote:“I return with pleasure to the geologists of Italy… They refuted and ridiculed the physicotheological systems of Burnet, Whiston and Woodward…” (Principles of Geology, vol.2, p.33)
It is difficult to show the general tone of a book through quotation: it is present throughout, just under the surface, but one does not need to read many pages to gain a fairly accurate idea.
Lyell is generally scathing and contemptuous of anything connected to religion, and references to “Jerome” or to “a Carmelitan[sic] friar” and so forth are found throughout the section
of his work in which he pretends to present a history of science in the centuries leading up to his own. His open admiration for any “scientist” who did not believe the scriptures is matched
only by his alarmingly dismissive and condescending attitude towards those who:
Quote:“...subscribe to the position that all marine organic remains were proofs of the Mosaic deluge… Under the influence of such prejudices, three centuries were of as little avail as a few years in our own times, when we are no longer required to propel the vessel against the force of an adverse current.” (Ibid. p.25)
For “vessel” read “science” (though in reality it might as well mean “atheism”), for “force of an adverse current” read “influence of the Church.” In his letters, Lyell likewise refers
contemptuously to “Moses and his penal deluge” as having held back progress (in his letter to Murchison, 22nd Jan 1829, for instance). Even the secular scientists and academics of our own day have had no difficulty in recognising what sort of a man Charles Lyell was and what really motivated him:
Quote:“For, true or false, fair or unfair, Lyell’s autobiographical vision of himself as the spiritual saviour of geology, freeing the science from the old dispensation of Moses, has exercised an unbroken fascination over almost all who have struggled to unravel the history of British geology.” (‘British Journal for the History of Science,’ Vol.9, No.2, Lyell Centenary Issue, Cambridge University Press, 1975 - see: www.jstor.org/stable/4025798?seq=1)
Not surprisingly, Lyell, like Hutton before him, was neither a ‘Christian’ even in the broadest sense, nor a believer in the scriptures. He is usually referred to as a deist, although in the
Scotland of 200 years ago that is perhaps the closest equivalent of a present-day atheist:
Quote:“In his religious views, Lyell was essentially a deist, holding the position that God had originally created the world and life on it, and then had allowed nature to operate according to its own (God-given) natural laws, rather than constantly intervening to direct and shape the course of all history.” (‘The Young Charles Darwin,’ Keith Stewart Thomson, Yale University Press 2009, p.109)
Like Darwin, Lyell had no formal training in the science he was propounding and was only a wealthy amateur. But the link between the two men goes much further. Charles Lyell was the
man whose book Charles Darwin took aboard HMS Beagle and read during the three year voyage, the thing which, Darwin says, caused him to doubt the existence of God and turned him into an unbeliever by the time the voyage ended. Following his return from the voyage in 1836, Lyell befriended Darwin; over the years that followed he continually urged Darwin to publish his ideas on human origins and he used his influence to persuade the London publisher John Murray to publish Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species in 1859. All in all, Charles Lyell seems to have had a significant impact on the man who later would take credit for what we now call the theory of evolution. What’s more, although not exactly the father of uniformitarianism (since he developed the ideas of James Hutton), he is arguably the man who managed to make the idea ‘mainstream,’ who gave the world the notion that the earth is very old and the biblical flood a mere myth, and who did so, in his own words, as a means of freeing science from Moses.
Evolutionists and old-earthers will point to fossils as “evidence.” Where they appear to go wrong, it seems, is in conflating the evidence with their interpretation of the evidence. For
instance, that fossils exist is a fact. That they constitute a “record” is an interpretation. That different layers of rock can be found is a fact; that each one was laid down very slowly over
millions of years is an interpretation. Our interpretation of those same facts is that Noah’s flood did it all in one go. The battle begun in Hutton and Lyell’s day is still raging today. Let
us conclude by saying that present-day proponents of an old earth and the consequent denial of Noah’s flood (and yes, saying that the flood didn’t cover all the earth is really a denial,
since that is not the flood found in Genesis!), whether they realise it or not, are promoting uniformitarianism and perpetuating the legacy of Charles Lyell. Fr. Robinson, that means you.
