NAVIGATING THE PARADIGM SHIFTS OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY GEOLOGY: PAVING THE WAY FOR DARWIN

In the early nineteenth-century, geological evidence began to suggest inadequacies in theological methods of biblical criticism and exegesis. As secondary causation began to supersede divine intervention the watchmaker’s clock of natural theology began to unwind. The introduction of new ways of thinking about the history of the earth became a source of conflict between geology and theology. Conflict was used as a social conduit to expedite the acceptance of epistemological shifts, and to gain hegemonic control of geological facts. Resolution was decided in favor of geology largely by questioning the limitations of natural theology in determining these facts. How theologian-geologists navigated these shifts resulted in the creation of new geological paradigms. The completion of these paradigmatic shifts was crucial in the development and acceptance of evolution as a legitimate scientific theory.

Much of the historiography on the early nineteenth-century confrontation between science and religion has approached the subject through the later debates over Darwinian evolution, and not through the conceptual tools that precipitated the paradigm shifts preceding them. These new paradigms made reconstructing the evolution of the geological past possible. By approaching the conflict as geology’s struggle to develop in its own right, this paper explores the epistemological shifts that led to new paradigms. Debates over the Mosaic Flood, fossil record, timescale, and causation were played out in the public forum to gain an academic position for geology independent of ecclesiastical control. The navigation between Genesis and geology to resolve the key issues, particularly by the theologian-geologists, played a far more important role in the shifts that made evolution possible than has traditionally been recognized. By 1836, the departure from Mosaic geology and diluvial theories demonstrated that the history of the earth could be written apart from Judeo-Christian scriptures. This paved the way for young Darwin to propose geological theories that would culminate in 1859 with the publication of his theory of evolution by natural selection.