Set in Stone - James Hutton at Siccar Point

Sika Point is a site of international scientific importance, visited by many parties of geologists and students every year. It was just over 200 years ago that the pioneering geologist James Hutton came by boat to Sika Point with his colleagues John Playfair and James Hall. What they saw here was to lead to a revolution in our understanding of the history of the earth. Well here we are at Sika Point, perhaps one of the most famous geological sites anywhere in the world, a place where an old established worldview was completely overturned. This is where Hutton and his friends Playfair and Hall came in 1788 and observed this famous location and from the observations they made here they convinced everyone that the earth was not 6,000 years old, but that it was perhaps millions of years old, didn't they? That's right and Hutton famously said he could, contemplating these rocks here, he could see no vestige of a beginning or prospect of an end. Not much more than a century before Hutton, most naturalists and scientists had been men of great religious conviction. They accepted the historical accounts recorded in the bible and believed that the early chapters of the book of Genesis provided the key to unlocking the mysteries of the earth's past. They included men like Thomas Burnett who argued that the present surface of the earth had been shaped by the catastrophic worldwide flood that took place in the days of Noah. Another was John Woodward who thought that the fossils enclosed in the rock layers were the remains of creatures that had perished during the catastrophe. Both men were leading thinkers of their day and implicitly trusted what the bible said about the history of the world. They saw the rocks and fossils as a silent testimony to the events of creation and the flood. But over the next few decades there was a growing separation in people's minds between scientific truths and religious truths. The bible came to be regarded as a source of moral and religious instruction, but not as a reliable source of knowledge about the physical world. Consciously or otherwise, scholars began to explain the natural world without any reference to God. The biblical events of creation and the flood were sidelined in favor of increasingly speculative ideas about the earth's past.