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I have done ZERO studying about this lawyer come geologist(?) ~~LIAR~~ Lyell fellow, but still in all I have to wonder how it was he was able to pull off his incredible feat and stand much of science on its head. Was there an enormous ego at work or an agenda; or both? It's probably not worth the effort to try to get to the bottom of it but it might be instructive for us to keep in mind how apparently easy it is to accomplish something on this scale with the proper connections. The bigger the lie, or something like that???

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/614600/uniformitarianism

excerpt:

“The idea that the laws that govern geologic processes have not changed during the history of the Earth were articulated by the 18th-century Scottish geologist James Hutton, who in 1785 presented his ideas—later published in two volumes as Theory of the Earth (1795)—at meetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In this work Hutton showed that the Earth had a long history and that this history could be interpreted in terms of processes observed at the present, of which he gave examples. He showed, for instance, how soils were formed by the weathering of rocks and how layers of sediment accumulated. He stated that there was no need of any preternatural cause to explain the geologic record. Hutton’s proposal challenged the concept of a biblical Earth (with a history of some 6,000 years) that was created especially to be a home for man; the effect of his ideas on the learned world can be compared only with the earlier revolution in thought brought about by Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo when they displaced the concept of a universe centred on the Earth with the concept of a solar system centred on the Sun. Both advances challenged existing thought and were fiercely resisted for many years. In the publication Principles of Geology, 3 vol. (1830–33), the Scottish geologist Sir Charles Lyell deciphered the history of the Earth employing Huttonian principles and made available a host of new geologic evidence in support of the view that physical laws were permanent and that any form of supernaturalism can be rejected. Lyell’s work in turn profoundly influenced Charles Darwin, who recognized Lyell as having produced a revolution in science...”

They were simply working on theories using what information was available to them at the time. Lyell followed Hutton, and Darwin needed the long spans of time to explain his theory of evolution. The catastrophists understood that the earth wasn’t created six thousand years ago...what was created was the landscape, not the globe.

No one deserves to be called a liar imo. It’s a matter of interpretation, and clinging to dogma. In the case of Darwin he had to close his eyes to what he saw.