# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1861_S101
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Biblical History of Creation and the Geological Theories of the Earth's Formation. 101

the earth as well as the plant and animal world had, from the creation down to our own time, undergone no other changes than such as still occur and are observed today; b) if science in general — the speculative as well as the empirical — could draw a fixed boundary between what on the earth belongs to creation and what is the product of the development and formation that followed creation, or could even trace the process of development back with certainty to its very first beginnings and determine it. But these two cases are of such a kind that neither the one nor the other will ever occur."

"If science can draw no fixed boundary between the individual chief formations of the earth's crust, nor even determine which kinds of rock are the product of creation and which the product of the development that followed creation, then it can raise no well-founded objection to the assumption that in and with the fossil-free transition mountains the creative structure of the earth's body may have reached its completion, and hence that all rock and earth strata which contain petrified organisms, or consist of such, are to be held as products which were formed partly through the germs and forces placed by the Creator into the created world in gradual development, partly brought about by extraordinary catastrophes which broke in, in part over the whole earth, in part over individual regions. We do not draw this assumption from the evidence furnished by geognosy that the transition formations have the widest distribution on the earth, lying open to the day over immense spaces without being covered by other formations, while all the formations that follow them, despite the tremendous thickness in which they appear developed here and there, nevertheless bear throughout only the character of particular and local formations. We set up this assumption, rather, as a postulate of biblical doctrine of creation and biblical primeval history, and are convinced that it is overthrown or refuted neither by the assertion of many geologists that myriads, indeed millions, of years were required for the formation and development of individual kinds of rock — the coal formations, for example — nor by the geological doctrine that after the creation of plants and animals the whole earth was repeatedly set under water, the land repeatedly changed into sea floor and the sea floor into dry land. For as to the formation of the coal deposits and of many other kinds of rock, the case is not yet closed; so far neither the plutonic or pyrogenic origin of the crystalline rock formations, nor the origin of coal from carbonized plants and trees, has been made probable, let alone raised to the truth of an established fact. And the doctrine of repeated upheavals of the sea floor into solid land and repeated sinkings of the mainland into the sea bottom belongs among those geological hypotheses which contain much fiction and little truth. From the fact, ascertained by geognosy, that in various mountain formations