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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2005
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Claim CA114.28:

Nicolai Stenonis, known also as Nicolaus Steno, made important advances in anatomy and stratigraphy; he is credited with founding geology as a scientific field. He was a creationist.

Source:

Morris, Henry M. 1982. Bible-believing scientists of the past. Impact 103 (Jan.), http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=185

Response:

  1. Steno (1631-1686) lived long before the theory of evolution was proposed, when the Bible was universally accepted as history. Steno was a man of his times. Still, his little writing on geography was noncommital on the age of the earth.

  2. Creationism played a part in keeping Steno's theories -- and geology in general -- from being widely accepted for several decades. In particular, belief in a young earth ruled out repeated episodes of deposition and mountains slowly rising above the sea.

  3. Steno's theories were founded on entirely "naturalistic" rules of inference. He explained the past in terms of existing processes such as sediments being deposited on top of older strata and molding to preexisting shapes (Cutler 2003, chap. 10).

Further Reading:

Cutler, Alan. 2003. The Seashell on the Mountaintop. New York: Dutton.
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created 2005-2-18