About the year 1760 news of the discovery of marine fossils in various elevated districts of Europe reached Voltaire. He too had a theologic system to support, though his system was opposed to that of the sacred books of the Hebrews. He feared that these new discoveries might be used to support the Mosaic accounts of the Deluge. All his wisdom and wit, therefore, were compacted into arguments to prove that the fossil fishes were remains of fishes intended for food, but spoiled and thrown away by travelers; that the fossil shells were accidentally dropped by Crusaders and pilgrims returning from the Holy Land; and that the fossil bones of a hippopotamus found between Paris and Étampes were parts of a skeleton belonging to the cabinet of some ancient philosopher. Through chapter after chapter Voltaire, obeying the supposed necessities of his theology, fights desperately the growing results of the geologic investigations of his time.[1]
But far more wide-spread and disastrous was the effort on the other side to show that the fossils were caused by the Deluge of Noah.
No supposition was too violent to support a theory which was considered vital to the Bible. Sometimes it was claimed that the tail of a comet had produced the deluge. Sometimes, by a prosaic rendering of the expression regarding the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep, a theory was started that the earth contained a great cistern, from which the waters came and to which they retired. By taking sacred poetry as prose, and by giving a literal interpretation of it, Thomas Burnet in his "Sacred Theory of the Earth," Winston in his "Theory of the Deluge," and others like them, built up systems which bear to real geology much the same relation that the "Christian Topography" of Cosmas bears to real geography. In vain were exhibited the absolute geological, zoölogical, and astronomical proofs that no universal deluge, or deluge covering any great extent of the earth, had taken place within the last six thousand or sixty thousand years; in vain did Bishop Clayton declare that the deluge could not have taken place save in that district where Noah lived before the flood; in vain was it shown that, even if there had been a universal deluge, the fossils were not produced by it; the only answers were the citation of the text—"and all the high mountains which were under the whole heaven were covered"—and denunciation of infidelity. In England, France, and Germany, belief that the fossils were produced by the Deluge of Noah was insisted upon as part of that faith essential to salvation.[2] It took a hundred and twenty
- ↑ See Voltaire, "Dissertation sur les Changements arrivés dans notre Globe," also Voltaire, "Les Singularités do la Nature," chapter xii., near close of vol. v. of the Didot edition of 1843; also Jevons, "Principles of Science," vol. ii., p. 328.
- ↑ For a candid summary of the proofs from geology, astronomy, and zoölogy, that the Noachian Deluge was not universally or widely extended, see McClintock and Strong, "Cyclopædia of Biblical Theology and Ecclesiastical Literature," article "Deluge." For general history see Lyell, D'Archiæ, and Vezian. For special cases showing bitterness of the conflict, see the Rev. Mr. Davis's' "Life of Rev. Dr. Pye Smith," passim.
