Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Other prominent Gap Theory advocates in the first half of the nineteenth century
(Millhauser 1954 and 1959 mentions several of these) included W.D. Coneybeare, author
of Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales (1822); and Sharon Turner, whose
Sacred History of the World (1833) interpreted the Gap Theory to children and went
through many editions. John Harris, in The Pre-Adamite Earth (1846), wrote:
My firm persuasion is that the first verse of Genesis was designed, by the divine Spirit, to announce the
absolute origination of the material universe by the Almighty Creator; and that it is so understood in the
other parts of holy writ; that, passing by an indefinite interval, the second verse describes the state of our
planet immediately prior to the Adamic creation, and that the third verse begins the account of the six days’
work. [Quoted in Hitchcock 1851:48]
Although originally promoted as a harmonization between Genesis and geology,
the Gap Theory was also accepted by some theologians who denounced geologists as
infidels attacking God. Anton Westermeyer, a German, elaborated on Gap Theory
theology in The Old Testament Vindicated from Modern Infidel Objections (date
unknown). He taught that generations of creatures of the original creation succumbed to
Satan’s corruption and became demons. During the six-day re-creation, God destroyed
these demons or drove them from their original habitat; they, in turn, “tried to frustrate
God’s plan of creation and exert all that remained to them of might and power to hinder
or at least to mar the new creation.” The creatures of which we have fossils remians
were the result: “the horrible and destructive monsters, these caricatures and distortions
of creation” (Westermeyer, quoted in A. White 1960:(I)243).
John Pye Smith, head of Homerton Divinity College, produced a remarkable
variant of the Gap Theory in his book On the Relations Between the Holy Scriptures and
Some Parts of Geological Science (1854; originally 1839), which was popularly known
as Scripture and Geology. Pye Smith, who was geologically knowledgeable, abandoned
the idea of a worldwide Deluge. Mankind’s sinfulness had prevented the ante-diluvian
population from spreading much beyond its origin. “If so much of the earth was
overflowed as was occupied by the human race, both the physical and moral ends of that
awful visitation were answered,” he wrote. Pursuing this line of reasoning further, he
tried to reconcile geology with the Bible by proposing that the Creation of Genesis was
only regional as well. Six thousand years ago, God laid waste (largely by vulcanism) and
flooded a portion of the earth’s surface. God then restored and repopulated it as Eden, to
be man’s abode. The region flooded prior to this re-creation was western Asia; the flood
waters drained off into the Caspian Sea and Indian Ocean (quoted in Hitchcock
1851:61-62, 137). The original creation occurred ages before this. Pye Smith’s strange
scheme was denounced by the literalists, and apparently had few followers, but,
according to Millhauser, it was endorsed by scientists such as Whewell, Sedgwick, Sir
John Herschel, and Baden Powell.
In 1859, Paton Gloag, a minister, suggested a variant on Pye Smith’s variant. He
knew that the earth is ancient; he also knew that evolution was impossible. The Genesis
creation was “not the original creation-.out of nothing, but a new arrangement or
remodelling out of previously existing materials.” After a lengthy discussion of both
Buckland’s Gap Theory approach and Pye Smith’s modification, Gloag presented his
own proposal: that the pre-Adamic destruction was worldwide but only partial—not all
life became extinct; some survived into the present creation.