Cuvier, the founder of paleontology, says in his discourse on the revolutions of the globe, “Moses has left us a cosmogony, the exactitude of which is most wonderfully confirmed every day.”
Quensted says, “Moses was a great geologist, wherever he may have obtained his knowledge.” Again he says, “The venerable Moses, who makes the plants appear first, has not yet been proven at fault; for there are marine plants in the very lowest deposit.”
Dana, of Yale College, has said that the record of creation given by Moses and that written in the rocks are the same in all general features.
Whence came the wisdom which kept Moses from hopelessly blundering?
Moses places the account of the original creation in the first verse. In the second, he states the earth fell into chaos. “It became (not was) without form, and void.”
Isaiah, the prophet, declares definitely that God did not create the earth without form and void—God never was the author of chaos—he made the earth habitable from the beginning.
The first verse of Genesis records the creation of this original and habitable earth. The second verse shows, as the result of some mighty cataclysm, that the original earth fell into a state of chaos. The second verse, and the verses following, are the record of the making over of the earth after it had fallen into a state of chaos.
Whence the wisdom which taught Moses what science in our day is only beginning to spell out, that the present earth is not an original creation, but a remaking; that the original creation goes back beyond the time of shifted crust, of tilted rock, of ice and fire and mist and formless chaos?
Whence came the wisdom and knowledge which led Job to say that it is impossible to count the stars for number, when it was possible in his day, and is equally possible in our day, to count them with the naked eye?
How did he know, what the telescope alone reveals, that the number of the stars as flashed forth in the field of these telescopes is utterly beyond our computation; and that in the attempt to number them, figures break, fall into dust, and are swept away as the chaff of the summer’s threshing floor.