What happens when you see the earth, not as a univocal creation, created all at once but instead as forming over a timescale we can hardly comprehend? For one it opens up the timescale so that Darwin can begin to imagine the possibilities of species developing over an infinitely broad timescale. But there’s something more about this geological breaking open of time—toward what is called Deep Time—that makes Hutton and then Smith lifelong though often unnoticed partners in our understanding of the very foundations of the world. And it makes me wonder if in part, the ancient prophet Isaiah saw a kind of Deep Time, a geologic process unfolding such that, “Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground level, the rugged places a plain.”[1] Geologists too like Isaiah, see valleys raised up to mountains by earthquake and tectonic plate, and rough ground made plain by the weathering of wind and water. There is they say, “a sermon in stone.” Or as Jesus says “even the stones cry out.”[2]

[1] Isaiah 40

[2] Luke 19:40