The man who overthrew biblical geology
• Skeptics & Atheists
A review of Revolutions in the Earth: James Hutton and the True Age of the World:
The theory, so compact and sublime in the favourite 18th-century phrase, ravished the Edinburgh circle of Adam Smith, Joseph Black, Adam Ferguson and Hugh Blair but was bitterly opposed elsewhere on both scientific and religious grounds. The Irish chemist Richard Kirwan, one of its most formidable opponents, argued that Hutton's succession of worlds violated both common sense and the books of Moses and led "to an abyss from which human reason recoils".