# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1861_S42
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

[a theory] founded [by him], who, upon a more precise examination of the
fossils, recognized that the delicate, mostly well-preserved petrifactions,
which mostly correspond entirely to living organisms, could not possibly
have originated from such a general revolution, in which everything would
have had to be ground to pieces, but rather could only have come into
being through the dead organisms having been enveloped, on the spot,
by wholly gradual, quiet deposits of the sea or of inland waters, and
thereby petrified. Vallisneri and his pupils regarded the petrifaction-
bearing strata of the earth as ante-diluvian or antediluvian, and ascribed
to the Flood, which they allowed to stand only as an article of faith, no
natural-historical significance whatsoever, whereas others assumed several
partial floods, in order to explain the remarkable discovery made upon
more precise geognostic examination of the stratified mountains, that of
the stratified formations some contained only marine organisms, others
only organisms of dry land, so that such regions must have been,
repeatedly and alternately, dry land and sea bottom, in that they let
these floods arise from the collapse of great portions of dry land into
the abyss of the sea. Already these theories came into conflict with the
biblical history, which knows of only one Flood. But the contradiction
became still greater when, through Zach. Werner, in the last decades of
the previous century, the various kinds of rock were divided into several
main formations, supposed to have formed in successive periods of time,
and when this division received an apparently very weighty confirmation
through the researches of Cuvier (recherches sur les Ossemens fossiles,
1808) and others, who arranged and classified the doctrine of the
petrifactions or fossil organisms according to natural-historical
principles. Through this theory the foundation was laid for the geological
doctrine of several periods of creation or formation of the earth, which
found ever more approval and applause the further the geognostic and
paleontological researches advanced. To be sure, Buckland, in his famous
Reliquiae Diluvianae of the year 1823, still assembled a wealth of
geological facts meant to attest and prove the universality of the biblical
Flood; but against this evidence there arose so much opposition, partly
quite justified, on the part of the other geologists, that Buckland himself,
in his later work, Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to
Natural Theology, of the year 1836, retracted his earlier view of the
Diluvial formation and exchanged it for the hypothesis that all the facts
which seem to speak for an inundation of the whole earth up to the peaks
of the highest mountains furnished testimony only for a great revolution
which our globe suffered before the creation reported in the Bible, the
creation by which the human race came into being. With that, geology had
done away with the Flood, and had won the victory for its theorem of
several creations, prior to the present shaping of the earth with its
still-existing plant and animal world."