Young-Earth Creationists in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain? Towards a Reassessment of ‘Scriptural Geology’

Abstract

In 1994, in these pages, Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey made an eloquent case for the non-partisan study of science’s interactions with popular culture. They called for historians of popular science to imitate “the historian of popular customs or the ethnographer of witchcraft” and “adopt a ring-fenced methodological neutrality towards their object of analysis”. 1 Thirteen years on, their call appears to have been answered. Our understanding of many areas sidelined by old-style history of science has been greatly enriched. This is especially apparent in the historiography of ‘science and religion’, where the new drive for non-partisan analysis (advocated most notably by John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor) has given rise to illuminating studies of transformations of natural knowledge by religious communities and denominations. 2 The truism that natural knowledge is ‘contested terrain’ is accompanied by a methodological rule of thumb: if an idea or practice was taken seriously by historical actors, it should be taken seriously by historians. However, not all areas of the history of science have been dealt such even-handed treatment. Closer study of those which have fallen through this particular net confi rms Cooter and Pumfrey’s suggestion that practising genuinely value-neutral history of science is easier said than done, since it “proceed[s] against cultural values so deeply embedded as to render ‘popular science’ an oxymoron”. 3 The interventions of biblical literalists in early nineteenth-century geology have been briefl y highlighted by Brooke and Cantor as important symptoms of a cultural watershed in need of closer attention. 4 Yet the so-called ‘scriptural geologists’ continue to occupy an anomalous position in the historiography. Accounts of the development of geology routinely make reference to these fi gures — Granville Penn and Andrew Ure are relatively familiar names — yet they have rarely been the primary subjects of historical research. 5 Such a situation lends itself to the propagation of half-truths, especially as the investigation of these fi gures involves methodological challenges relating to our inherited terminology, the history of discipline-formation, concepts of ‘general’ or ‘public’ opinion, and the vigour of present-day debates paralleling those in the early nineteenth century. These challenges have only rarely been acknowledged, still less met, by scholars commenting on the subject. In this article I aim to set out some of these challenges, to clear the ground for future research by removing some common misconceptions, and to demonstrate that literalist writing on earth history deserves serious historical attention.