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Down to Earth

The rise of naturalism in the earth sciences is discussed in terms of the disappearance from the geological literature of references to the Bible and God. From Immanuel Kant’s ground-breaking nebular hypothesis of 1755, such references were to be found with decreasing frequency in the leading treatises that dealt with the origin and historical development of Earth. Biblical cosmogony and God-talk were not included in the new earth and planetary sciences but relegated to the sphere of metaphysics. Especially Alexander von Humboldt, by the middle of the nineteenth century, proved trend-setting, and the Humboldtian approach of epistemological naturalism acquired predominance. All the same, in many instances, the disentanglement of geology and theology did not go with anti-religious sentiment but with what Ronald Numbers refers to as the privatization of religion.