The topic I have chosen to compare is Geologic paradigms, Uniformitarianism vs. Catastrophism. First let's define the two paradigms. Uniformitarianism is the belief that the same natural occurrences and processes that work in the cosmos now, have always worked in the cosmos even long-ago and apply everywhere in the cosmos today. The belief was originally from the late 1700's, by James Hutton who was a Scottish physician and geologist, who's first publication on the subject was in the "Theory of the Earth" and was labeled the fundamental principle of geology. Catastrophism is the clarification (of why something works or happens the way it does) that changes in the earth's crust during land/terra and rock-based changes in history that have resulted mostly from unexpected physical and unique events. This heavily affected people's thinking about the Earth in the 1600's. Catastrophism was the brain child of James Ussher who timetabled human and Earth history and determined where we lived was only a few thousands years old. Ussher documented that the world as we know it was created only about 4,000 years ago. Now let's look at both paradigms and compare each to old-Earth and Young-Earth viewpoints. Old-Earth Secular View …show more content…
As stated by Lutgens and Tarbuck 'the physical, chemical, and biological laws that operate today have also operated in the geologic past". New innovations today help us to find out the history of rocks from yester year which is commonly expressed in the saying of "The present is the key to the past". One such key to the past was discovered by Charles Darwin in the 1800's on the Cape Verde islands, off of the coast of Africa, embedded between marine shell layers he found large fossil mammals that were closely related to small living forms of the same mammals today. These layers were very similar to current living sea shell