Why you should become a Bible-believing anarchist
who also believes the universe was created around 4004 B.C.
ChatGPT says about Deluc:
Publicly tried to reconcile geology with Genesis, but his correspondence reveals unease with a strict young-earth view and recognition of immense pre-human ages.
This was 10 years before James Hutton published his geological theories. What "geology" was Deluc trying to "reconcile" with Genesis? What did he think "geology" was saying that contradicted what the Bible said?
Great question — Deluc is one of those fascinating “in-between” figures who lived before Hutton’s famous 1785 paper and before geology had hardened into either catastrophism or uniformitarianism. Let me set the stage.
1. What “geology” meant in Deluc’s day
The word “géologie” was just coming into vogue. Deluc himself helped popularize it; his 1778 Lettres physiques et morales sur l’histoire de la terre is sometimes cited as an early use of the term.
“Geology” for Deluc was essentially natural history of the Earth’s crust — especially mineral strata, fossils, and the evidence of mountains and valleys.
He was trained as a physicist and naturalist in Geneva, and when he emigrated to England in the 1770s, he carried a reputation as both a devout Christian and a keen observer of Alpine formations.
2. What needed “reconciliation”
By the 1760s-70s, naturalists had already observed things that seemed to stretch the Genesis chronology:
Thick strata sequences: In the Alps, Jura, and elsewhere, there were enormous stacks of sedimentary rocks, some full of marine fossils, lying far above sea level. These looked like processes that took more than 6,000 years.
Successions of fossils: Naturalists (especially Buffon, though censured in France) pointed out that fossils appeared in distinct layers, suggesting a history of the Earth older than a single year-long flood.
Erosion and valleys: Alpine valleys, glaciers, and river systems looked as if they had been carved over long time spans.
So the “geology” Deluc confronted was an accumulation of empirical anomalies that didn’t easily square with Archbishop Ussher’s 4004 BC chronology.
3. What Deluc actually argued
Deluc remained explicitly biblical: he rejected an eternal Earth or a truly ancient Earth (millions of years, à la Buffon). He insisted on a creation in time, by God, and believed Genesis gave a true account.
But he expanded the pre-human period: he thought the Earth had gone through long formative epochs before Adam — chaotic ages, vast stretches of pre-Adamic time in which strata, mountains, and seas could form.
He identified the Noahic Flood with the last great revolution in Earth’s crust, but admitted the rock record seemed to preserve multiple earlier “revolutions.”
Thus, Genesis described the most recent acts relevant to man, but nature revealed a much longer natural prelude.
4. How this contrasted with Hutton
When Hutton presented his theory in 1785 and then in Theory of the Earth (1795), he argued for effectively infinite deep time: “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”
Deluc, a decade earlier, had not gone that far. He rejected infinity (as a Christian), but still recognized immense finite ages before the creation of man.
Where Hutton wanted cycles without beginning, Deluc still wanted epochs within creation, with God as the author.
5. Why this matters
Deluc illustrates that even before Hutton, geology had raised enough evidence (fossils, strata, Alpine geology) to put Christian thinkers on the defensive. “Reconcilers” like Deluc tried to keep the Bible central by:
treating Genesis as a record of man’s creation and flood, not of the Earth’s whole history,
and granting natural history a much longer prelude than Ussher’s 6,000 years.
So the “geology” Deluc was reconciling was essentially the expanding fossil and strata evidence that pointed to long pre-human ages, especially as systematized by Buffon and the natural history tradition.
As we see here, " the expanding fossil and strata evidence that pointed to long pre-human ages" was not something anyone in the 1700's actually saw with their own scientific eyes, but a myth that was created with their unscientific myth-creating imagination.