Charles Lyell (1797-1875) and William Whewell (1794-1866): between the old and the new catastrophism

The New-Catastrophism, as a fundamental methodology in the Earth Sciences, was consolidated at the end of 20th Century, harmonizing both the principles of actualism-uniformitarianism and the ideas about catastrophism. A controversy between these doctrines was begun in the early decades of the 19th Century, as an answer of William Whewell to the ideas of Charles Lyell: Whewell was a supporter of supernatural causes with the intervention of the Divinity in the Earth’s past time through catastrophes, as a rule for explaining the modelling of the earth surface, and the diversity of the living beings, while Lyell, on the contrary, defended the gradualism, in which the causes were both natural in origin and now in operation. Although in the work of these authors a possible cohabitation of both ideas can beglimpsed, the time as a factor particularly made their coexistence impossible: Lyell was a supporter of several million years for the age of the Earth, and catastrophes were therefore unnecessary in the explanation of Globe modeling, while Whewell only accepted the six thousand years of biblical chronology, and, so, gradualism was insufficient for such an explanation. Some scientists subsequently, such as William Thomson and Tomas H. Huxley, were in favor of a reform of geological principles to bring them into line with new researches, although only the latter found no incompatibility between the two doctrines.