EDWARD HITCHCOCK, RELIGION & SCIENCE

Edward Hitchcock was one of the 19^th century’s most prominent American scientists, yet his name disappeared from public notice and remained obscure for most of the 20^th century. He has come to notice in recent years due mainly to his discovery of dinosaur footprints, thus founding the discipline of ichnology, but there were other reasons for his fame: He was Massachusetts’ first state geologist, whose maps are still considered essentially accurate. He was a founding member of the professional geological organization that soon became the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was the first to recognize that the Connecticut River Valley was a former lakebed. He did not subscribe to Agassiz’s theory of a glacial age, but thought ice and water must have been responsible for much surface geology. He was the first American to write a geology textbook that was not simply derived from British and European sources.

Hitchcock never accepted evolution, yet he would not sit comfortably with today’s antievolution Creationists, particularly not with believers in a young Earth. He recognized extinction events followed by six “new creations” and spoke with ease in terms of millions of years. For Hitchcock, science and religion informed one another. Science was a method for exploring God’s creation. His geological descriptions, while meticulous, were also often lyrical, while his sermons exhorted his listeners to see nature from a scientific perspective. In 1821, four years before leaving the ministry to teach Natural History at Amherst College, his first Thanksgiving sermon to his flock in the tiny hilltown of Conway, Massachusetts, catalogued the wonder of God’s creation: an estimate of how many men had ever lived on Earth, how many species of mammals, birds, amphibians, insects, worms. He touched briefly on minerals before moving on to the planets, stars, and other solar systems and even universes. His capacity for astonishment disciplined by reason seems nearly limitless.

Hitchcock continued to preach even after becoming a professor at Amherst College, and while his goal was to send Christian men out to evangelize the far corners of the Earth, he wanted his missionaries to be scientifically literate. For the ease with which he embraced religious and scientific commitments with equal ardor, he is an instructive figure today.