Uniformitarianism Vs Catastrophism

I. Introduction It is a tale as old as time. How old is our Earth and how has it come to be the Earth we see today? The paradigms centered around this debate involve those of uniformitarianism and catastrophism. Uniformitarianism maintains that the Earth and the things in it came to be slowly, over a long period of time; whereas, catastrophism indicates that large-scale catastrophes shaped the Earth. Catastrophism spawned into the belief of one catastrophic event, namely, Noah’s Flood, which is the view on which I will focus. To that end, this paper will explore these two long-held viewpoints.

II. Old-Earth Secular View Uniformitarianism dates back to the 1830 's and is based on the methodology of Charles Lyell 's Principles of

Amidst the controversy, the two altering views usually divide people on a religious basis and separate believers from non-believers. Therefore, those with a young-earth view adhere to ideas concerning uniformitarianism such as that held by Henry Morris (n.d), “It is pure assumption that one can only interpret all the data from the unobserved past within a naturalistic, uniformitarian model.” Holding an opposite view, uniformitarianists would customarily never see the Earth as being young. However, as of late, there is “an increasing acceptance today of the role of rare, large-scale events” (Leddra, 2010) for modern uniformitarianism

Both uniformitarianism and catastrophism attempt to explain the geological features found on the Earth’s surface and the age of the Earth. For this explanation, both use research of geological theories such as those of sedimentation and continental drift. Much of the commonalities of geological features and the age of the earth rely on the rules of relative dating (Ross, Faulkner, Gollmer, & Whitmore, 2015)(text 153), on which both views agree. Relative dating is based on three principle laws; the law of original horizontality, the law of superposition, and the law of lateral continuity. By agreeing on these three laws, both uniformitarianists and catastrophists use these means to determine geological age and events (Ross et al.,