The Victorians, Creation, and the Dinosaur Problem
The Earth was created in seven days. On which day were the dinosaurs made?
Overworked and haunted by hallucinations, Hugh Miller wrote a note to his wife Lydia and shot himself at some time between late 23 December and early Christmas Eve 1856. One of his last acts had been to correct the proofs for his new book, The Testimony of the Rocks. Posthumously published the following year, the book memorialised a theory that Miller, celebrated geologist and evangelical journalist of Scotland’s Free Church, had made his own: the theory that the Bible accurately describes Earth’s long geological history. God’s six ‘days’ of creation and seventh day of rest, as described in the Book of Genesis, were to be interpreted figuratively. They were not literal days, Miller argued, but visions of moments in Earth’s deep history. The author of Genesis had seen through time.
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