Scriptural geologist

Scriptural geologists (or Mosaic geologists) were a heterogeneous group of writers in the early nineteenth century, who claimed "the primacy of literalistic biblical exegesis" and a short Young Earth time-scale. Their views were marginalised and ignored by the scientific community of their time. They "had much the same relationship to 'philosophical' (or scientific) geologists as their indirect descendants, the twentieth-century creationists." Paul Wood describes them as "mostly Anglican evangelicals" with "no institutional focus and little sense of commonality". They generally lacked any background in geology, and had little influence even in church circles.

Up until the end of the 18th century Classical British scholarship was theologically based, using the Bible as a basic source for world history and chronology. Early work in the developing science of geology sought "theories of the Earth" combining mechanical physical laws in the natural philosophy of René Descartes with belief in the global flood described in Genesis . The Genesis Flood was given serious consideration as a basis for explaining geological data, and though by 1800 naturalists accepted an old-earth cosmology, this was not an inevitable conclusion among the educated. Amateur and popular geologists continued to use scripture centred geology well into the 19th century.

In the 18th century, geologists became convinced that an immense time had been needed to build up the huge thickness of rock strata visible in quarries and cliffs, implying extensive pre-human periods. The concept of Neptunism taught by Abraham Gottlob Werner proposed that rock strata had been deposited from a primeval global ocean rather than by Noah's Flood. Opposing this, James Hutton proposed an indefinitely old cycle of eroded rocks being deposited in the sea, consolidated and heaved up by volcanic forces into mountains which in turn eroded, all in natural processes which continue to operate. By 1807 when the Geological Society of London was founded as the first professional geological society, most of its members accepted a basic geologic time scale, and researchers including William Smith had found that strata could be identified by characteristic fossils.

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