# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1861_S41
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Biblical Creation Account and the Geological Theories of the Earth's Formation. 41

near at hand that, when the contradiction between the divine words and
the false theory clearly emerges, the latter is nevertheless held fast; that
the little leaven leavens the whole lump; that the inspiration of Scripture
is altered in its very essence; that the word of God, which condescends to
mankind, is transformed into various stages of the development of the
human spirit; and that the passage into the domain of the Gnostics is
thereby accomplished.

An illustrative example of the fruitlessness and perversity of efforts of
this latter kind is furnished by the attempts of present-day theologians and
natural scientists who believe the Scriptures, to reconcile the geological
theories of the earth's formation now current with the statements of
Scripture. On this subject there has appeared an excellent treatise by
Prof. Dr. C. Keil, under the above-named title, in the 4th number of the
theological journal of Dr. A. W. Dieckhoff and Dr. Th. Kliefoth. In the
supposition that a brief overview summarizing the main points of what is
communicated there might not be unwelcome to many of our readers, we
let such an overview follow here.

First we reproduce, unabridged, the survey of the attempts of more
recent times to explain the formation of the earth. "When René Descartes
had developed his metaphysics in his principia philosophiae, Amsterdam
1641, according to which the earth was originally a fiery star that, upon
gradually cooling, became covered with a crust of slag, upon which the
waters lay and above which a firm crust formed, which broke apart in part
during the Flood, whereby the subterranean waters rose up and the earth
attained its present configuration — this speculation was brought into
agreement with the Bible by Amerpoel in his Cartesius Mosaizans, 1669. The
English theologian Thom. Burnet, in his Telluris theoria sacra, 1681, and
the German philosopher Leibniz, in his Protogaea, 1693 and 1749, sought to
attach their speculative ideas about the origin of the earth so closely to
the biblical primeval history that both, in a manner similar to Descartes,
derive the present shape of our earth's body from the Flood. When
naturalists thereupon began to direct their attention to the petrified
organisms observed in the strata of the earth, most of them likewise
wished to explain these formations from the Flood. Thus John Woodward of
London, who in his Natural History of the Earth of the year 1696, relying
on specific observations, sought to show how, during the Flood, the waters
that rose up from the great deep destroyed and crushed the whole upper
crust of the earth and dissolved it in water into a slurry; that this
slurry had also contained all the organisms perishing in the process, and
had gradually settled together with these — our fossils — from which the
strata that we observe would have arisen. This theory found numerous
adherents, of whom we will name only Scheuchzer and Silberschlag, and it
may be described as the prevailing view of the past century, although not
long after it had taken shape an opposing theory developed, especially
from Italy, through Ant. Vallisneri (1721)