Charles Lyell

Cited by David Montgomery on pp131 of "The Rocks Don't Lie":

p131 In 1827 Lyell wrote "We must recollect that the Mosaic narration is elliptical in the extreme, and that it makes no pretensions whatever to supply those minute scientific details which some would endeavor to extort from it." Montgomery comments "Lyell was echoing Augustine in believing that it would be hard to convince rational men to follow a religion that denied things one could see for oneself." Montgomery was presumably referring to what we call "Augustine's Reserve".

p132 Lyell's explorations with Roderick Murchison, nice diagram.

p132 Lyell's travels revealed that different rocks had different fossils, and found that "Fossils could be used to reliably assess the age of strata in southern Europe, something that could not be determined from mineral composition alone."

p133 "More than anything else his exploration of European geology convinced him of the enormous span of geologic time and that a global flood was not responsible for shaping the modern landscape." Lyell moved to the Hutton position. He wrote Principles of Geology to persuade toward the position of great age.

p134 Lyell continued to oppose the view that geologic changes all occurred by sudden catastrophes, and argued that what is seen in geologic history can be explained by processes now in operation.

p135 While acknowledging the role of catastrophes, Lyell argued that processes still in operation could sculpt geography. By the third volume of his Principles he explicitly dismissed the likelihood of a global flood as a geological reality.

p136 Lyell sought a position at King's College in 1831. He got the position, was attacked by Sedgwick on the "uniform action" line, but his carefully developed arguments began to influence Buckland.

Lyell cited by Meyer on p185 in The Return of the God Hypothesis