Kirwan based his accusations on the unlikely charge that Hutton had placed the earth’s origin beyond the domain of what science could consider or (in a stronger claim) had even denied that a point of origin could be inferred at all. Kirwan wrote in 1799: Recent experience has shown that the obscurity in which the philosophical knowledge of this [original] state has hitherto been involved, has proved too favorable to the structure of various systems of atheism or infidelity, as these have been in their turn to turbulence and immorality, not to endeavor to dispel it by all the lights which modern geological researches have struck out. Thus it will be found that geology naturally ripens…into religion, as this does into morality. In our more secular age, we may fail to grasp the incendiary character of such a charge at the end of the eighteenth century, when intellectual respectability in Britain absolutely demanded an affirmation of religious fealty, and when fear of spreading revolution from France and America equated any departure from orthodoxy with encouragement of social anarchy.
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