Through chapter after chapter, Voltaire, obeying the supposed
necessities of his theology, fought desperately the growing
results of the geologic investigations of his time.[229]
But far more prejudicial to Christianity was the continued
effort on the other side to show that the fossils were caused by
the Deluge of Noah.
No supposition was too violent to support this theory, which was
considered vital to the Bible. By taking the mere husks and
rinds of biblical truth for truth itself, by taking sacred
poetry as prose, and by giving a literal interpretation of it,
the followers of Burnet, Whiston, and Woodward 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, zoological, astronomical
proofs that no universal deluge, or deluge covering any large
part of the earth, had taken place within the last six thousand
or sixty thousand years; in vain did so enlightened a churchman
as Bishop Clayton declare that the Deluge could not have
extended beyond that district where Noah lived before the Flood;
in vain did others, like Bishop Croft and Bishop Stillingfleet,
and the nonconformist Matthew Poole, show that the Deluge might
not have been and probably was not universal; 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, to clinch the matter,
Worthington and men like him insisted that any argument to show
that fossils were not remains of animals drowned at the Deluge
of Noah was "infidelity.
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