# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1861_S69
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Biblical History of Creation and the Geological Theories of the Earth's Formation. 69

...held to be a tertiary deposit — grew, before the creation of light and of the atmosphere, in the "North German lignite formation, in which tree trunks occur that, according to their annual rings, were 3000 years old," or as "the trunk of a species of cypress found at the Siebengebirge, which had a diameter of eleven feet" (Pfaff, pp. 578 and 594)? Are we to believe that the mammoths buried in the Siberian ice fields, the remains of beasts of prey found in the caves of the limestone mountains — such as the 800 bears of the Gailenreuth Cave and the 2500 bears of the cave near Rabenstein, or the countless hyenas of Kirkdale Cave near York, and others (cf. Pfaff, p. 595) — lived and kept house in these caves before the creation of the sun, moon, and stars? Such a thing we cannot believe; we are indeed convinced that even men such as Kurtz and A. Wagner, who let the organisms buried in the tertiary and diluvial formations arise, exist, and perish before the biblical days of creation, do not hold the view that those plants grew without a heaven vaulted over the earth, with sunshine, clouds, and rain, or that those animals lived without any alternation of day and night, of light and darkness. But those scholars have not weighed the full implications of their hypothesis, and have therefore failed to recognize its incompatibility with the Bible. For if the beings preserved in fossil remains can only have lived in a world resembling the present world- and natural order, one that preceded this present one, then, after the destruction of those organisms, a creation of light and of the firmament with sun, moon, and stars would only be conceivable if the catastrophe that ended the life of those plant and animal kinds had been the destruction of the earlier world-system — a collapse of the former heaven and the former earth, either through fire, in which case, as Scripture testifies concerning the destruction awaiting our present world at the end of this age, the elements melted with fervent heat and the earth was burned up along with its works, or through some other force unknown to us, whereby heaven and earth were dissolved into a general chaos. In such a case, however, the organisms present on the earth would also have been utterly shattered and destroyed in the destruction of the universe, so that they could not now still be found everywhere on and beneath the surface of the earth newly created out of that chaos, in clearly recognizable, in part quite unharmed forms. This geological fact, that the perished organisms have been preserved in so easily recognizable a state, rules out the assumption of a destruction of the world, and nothing remains but, for the sake of the adopted hypothesis, either to strike out the biblical statement concerning the creation of the light, of the firmament of heaven, and of the sun together with the moon and the stars from Genesis 1, or to reinterpret these works of creation as a mere reappearance of light after a temporary darkening of the earth, as a gathering of clouds in the sky, as