# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1861_S71
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Biblical History of Creation and the Geological Theories of the Earth's Formation. 71

...to attain, or to have gained, is a vain conceit, a strange self-deception which in necessary consequence must lead to abandoning the truth of the biblical account of creation."

According to what has been said, it can hardly be doubtful to the Christian who holds Scripture to be a true and reliable revelation of God that the geological theories of the earth's formation are incapable of explaining the true state of affairs according to the truth. That these theories, apart from Scripture, are of highly questionable worth, the author offers as evidence:

1. "One concludes from the sequence of the mountain formations as to the chronological order of their origin and development, in that it is assumed as settled that these formations arose by mechanical means, either through deposit (sediment) or through uplift (eruption). But this assumption is not truly recognized truth, but only supposition and conjecture. Concerning the manner in which the mountain formations arose, the geologists, as is known, are divided into two mutually hostile schools: the Neptunists, who derive all mountain formations from the wet way, through deposit, and the Plutonists, who let all formations devoid of fossils be formed by fire or glowing heat. According to the Neptunists the primary rock formations are the oldest formations; according to the Plutonists the granite mountains were first driven upward out of the earth's interior, breaking through the transitional and Flötz mountains, and are therefore of more recent origin. That neither theory is able to explain all the phenomena in the conditions of stratification is being recognized more and more in the most recent times, so that a third theory, which holds that the formation of the rock masses occurs through chemical processes, is gaining more and more acceptance. If now the mountains — not only those of crystalline, but also those of stratified rock — arose not by mechanical means but through chemical processes, in which, besides water and fire, electricity, galvanism and magnetism, and perhaps still other forces not yet recognized by physics and chemistry, may have been at work, then formations of different kinds could also have occurred at the same time and been deposited one upon another. So long, then, as natural science has not advanced beyond mere opinion and conjecture concerning the manner of the origin and formation of the mountain masses and their strata, so long as the currently prevailing plutonic theory has one region after another disputed and wrested from it, so long the conclusions drawn from the succession of the various rock strata concerning the periods of their formation can make no claim to truth and validity."

2. "To this must be added that not even the main formations (primary mountains, transitional mountains, and tertiary mountains) — still less the various deposits of which each of these chief constituents of mountain formation is composed — lie everywhere one upon another in the sequence assumed by the system, but here and there in quite a different order. Not everywhere do the transitional formations lie upon the crystalline pri-