by Ben Clausen
Translated for Ciencia de los Orígenes, Sept-Dec 1997, N.48, p.6,7
William Buckland was one of the most accomplished and popular
English geologists of the early nineteenth century. He graduated from Oxford in 1805, took
holy orders, and became a professor of geology at the same university. He twice served as
president of the Geological Society and in 1845 became dean of Westminster.
Buckland sought to harmonize his geological findings with Scripture,
and in so doing his geology has been disparagingly characterized as a form of antiquated
science in the service of supposed religious truth. From the Kirkdale Cave in England he
described a variety of vertebrates, including hyena, elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus,
bear, and fox. He integrated his cave paleontology with diluvialism, which attributed a
variety of geological surface phenomena to the waters of Noah's Flood as described in his Reliquiae
Diluvianae; or, Observations on the Organic Remains Contained in Caves, Fissures, and
Diluvial Gravel, and on other Geological Phenomena, Attesting the Action of an Universal
Deluge (1823). In this work Buckland treated the deluge as the last of a series of
catastrophes, although later he abandoned this interpretation. Historians have argued both
that Buckland was a catastrophist who perpetuated the conservative theological opinion and
also that he was drifting away from biblical literalism toward interdenominational
tolerance.
Buckland wrote one of the Bridgewater Treatises designed to extol the
"power, wisdom and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation". His Geology
and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (1836) pointed out the
evidence from geology as well as biology, for design by an all-wise Creator. He gave the
sloth, both living and extinct, as a prominent example of design, with descriptions based
on a megatherium skeleton found near Buenos Aires in 1789. He denounced organic evolution
and opposed the concept of transmutation of species as non-empirical. Various groups of
the animal kingdom occurred simultaneously in the oldest fossiliferous deposits, and so
could not have descended one from the other. Buckland's treatise provided evidence for the
existence of God and indicated His unity by showing the unity of anatomical plans between
fossils.
Reference