>I am not suggesting a paradigm shift, but moving form a preparadigm state,
>where there were no unifying theories in the studies of the earth to a
>paradigm where there was a unifying theory developed by Hutton and expanded
>upon by Lyell, which had huge explanatory power. Prior to that time
>geology was just a hodge-podge of individuals, each moving in a different
>direction, with no unifying principles to guide them.
This is much like modern creationism. You have Morris doing his thing,
Baumgardner et al doing theirs. There is very little work on a common
hypothesis. And what is amazing is that most of the global flood
suggestions that one hears today were first suggested and rejected in the
17th century.
Hydrodynamic sorting which Morris advocates for the fossils was first
suggested by John Woodward.
This was the
deficiency that the physician John Woodward (1665-1728) sought to
make good, in his Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth
(1695). . . . Without acknowledging his debt to Steno - though
one of his critics made it explicit - Woodward framed his theory
around the postulate that ll fossiliferous strata had been laid
down horizontally at the time of the Deluge. The fossils they
contained dated from the ante-diluvian period. Together with all
the materials of the Earth's surface, they had been churned up
into a kind of suspension at the time of the Deluge. . . From
this thick suspension these materials, and the fossils, had then
settled out in order of their specific gravity, to form the
observed order of strata with their characteristic fossils. The
strata had subsequently collapsed into tilted positions, but in
general the post-diluvial world was one of order
tranquility."~Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils, (New
York: Neale Watson Academic Publications, 1976), p. 82
Anybody who has studied fossils in the rocks knows that this won't explain
the data.
Donald Patten's views of the flood as caused by a near miss by a comet, was
proposed in the 17th century by Whiston:
1696 A New Theory of the Earth, William Whiston proposed that the
Deluge was caused by a near miss with a comet.
"The idea that a comet might have caused the Deluge was not
original with Whiston. In December, 1694, a year and a half
before he published the theory, the noted astronomer Edmond
Halley had propounded a similar hypothesis before the Royal
Society but had refrained from publishing it 'lest by some
unguarded Expression he might incur the censure of the Sacred
Order.'"~John C. Greene, The Death of Adam, (New York: Mentor
Books, 1961), p. 28
Cuvier suggested that the earth had gone through many cataclysms with the
last having left the glacial till. This was used by Buckland in 1819 as
evidence for the global flood. The problem was that the glacial till only
covered the northern part of the northern hemisphere.
Then in the late
>1700's, Hutton put forth his immodest proposal that changed all of that
>forever. Of course, the change took place gradually, and those who had not
>thought of the idea themselves generally had to die off before the change
>was complete, but the younger adherents were fully committed to
>uniformitarian principles throughout the 19th century.
Not so, Buckland began his work in 1819 with the suggestion that the flood
was what left the glacial till. He didn't retract until the 1830s. Lyell
was Buckland's student.
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm