James Parkinson’s ‘system of successive creations’

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a new look at how the apothecary surgeon, James Parkinson (1755–1824), integrated his geological understanding with his religious ideas. It is only through the intellectual questions raised by the emerging science of geology that we are able to examine his religious beliefs as these were not apparently challenged by, and consequently not discussed in, any of his other published works on politics, medicine or chemistry. Although Parkinson held ‘conventional’ Christian beliefs prevailing at the time, he did not permit these to stand in the way of the geological evidence; his later private views regarding how the Creation story came about were never fully revealed in his publications. By accepting that a ‘system of successive creations’ had occurred, which circumvented certain aspects of the biblical account of Creation, he adapted his faith to accommodate the indisputable facts of geology, concurring with then modern views about how the Earth had formed.