Catastrophism | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Catastrophism

In the late seventeenth century, Anglican Archbishop James Ussher developed a biblical chronology that established the date of the Earth's creation at 9 a.m., October 26, 4004 b.c. His calculations were taken seriously for 200 years and promoted debates on the Earth's origin.

One of the most prevalent schools of thought that followed was catastrophism, which held that the Earth was formed by supernatural forces according to the account found in the Bible in the book of Genesis. Scientists who adhered to this belief system were called Neptunists.

Evidence that Earth was much older began to accumulate, and in 1785, James Hutton in a presentation to the Royal Society of Edinburgh challenged catastrophism. Hutton proposed that Earth was in a continuous but gradual process of change, constantly decaying, renewing, and repairing itself. He added that Earth had no semblance of a beginning and no prospect of an end. His ideas led to a school of thought, known as uniformitarianism, and scientists who adhered to it became known as Plutonists.

Uniformitarianism was sharply criticized by the Neptunists, led by Abraham Gottlob Werner, who believed that a great globe-engulfing sea had laid down all the rocky layers of Earth. They held that as the waters subsided, dry land emerged and sand and gravel washed down from the mountains into valleys and lowlands.

The debate continued to rage into the next decade and even the next century as scientists tried to align their observations and discoveries with catastrophism. For example, noted scientist Georges Cuvier, who was classifying and cataloging fossil remains, was pressured to accept the theory of catastrophism even though it did not coincide with his discoveries. In 1819, William Buckland attempted to resolve these differences by suggesting that there was no real need to reconcile geologic observations with the biblical account of creation because the Earth preceded the creation story.

As recently as the early 1900s, diluvialism creation theory, which held to the tenets of catastrophism, was popular for a couple of decades. It was based on the belief that one catastrophic event, the Mosaid flood (Noah's Ark), caused many of the Earth's surface features. It was abandoned, however, when scientists found evidence showing the dissimilarity of surface material, which refuted the theory of a worldwide flood.

A modern variant of catastrophism was born in 1980, when Luis Alvarez proposed that dinosaurs met their end 65 million years ago as the result of a huge asteroid impact. Eleven years later, the discovery of a gigantic crater off Mexico's Yucatan peninsula gave this theory a boost. However, many scientists remain unconvinced, noting that their interpretation of the fossil record doesn't support the idea of a cataclysmic extinction.