Dead Stones and Fossils of Life

There is probably no object within Nature that has not been used as a symbol sometime in human history.  Sometimes it is hard to understand what association provoked a particular object to become overlaid with certain meanings.  But not in the case of stones.  The obvious hardness of stone invites symbols and metaphors drawing upon that quality.  ("He had a heart of stone.")  So also does the association of timelessness prompted by rocks' not changing visibly during a single human life.  ("It is carved in stone.")

Given these associations with solidity, there is irony in that in the late 1700's, stones became associated with change -- immense change!  So much so that people felt that the stability of human existence was crumbling. In the late 1700's, the Scottish geologist James Hutton developed the principle that geological features of landscapes, even as immense and striking as they sometimes can be, had come about through slow geological changes over an immense amount of time. The shocking message of the stones was that, viewed from a wide perspective, they had been forever changing. Moreover, the message in some of those stones -- fossils -- was that there had been forms of life long before human history.

Today, a couple centuries later, most people have accepted that our human history is but a tiny piece of an immense cosmic timeline.  A timeline so incomprehensible that we have to use abstract numbers or metaphors (such as a 24-hour cosmic clock) to try to grasp it. Our human urge to connect with life encourages us to bring this matter of immense time down to a level we can relate to.  Down to a level we can hold and touch and feel.  That is what a small fossil can do!

I remember when, as a child, I first had a fossil explained to me.  I do not recall what type of tiny animal the fossil was an imprint of.  But I do remember how, as I held the hard stone and examined the small shape, I felt as if I were holding not an imprint but the skeleton of the animal itself.

John Muir
  (1838-1914)

For people of James Hutton's era and of the 1800's, an additional shock was the message in the fossils that entire species of life had gone extinct.  How could Providence allow such a thing? Other minds, however, were able to look at the matter of fossils and extinctions from a different perspective.  A more favorable perspective seems to have been more accessible for people who could see God's Spirit as being present through all the course of time, and as caring for all forms of life, not just human life.  For example, the American naturalist John Muir, looking at stone fossils as if they had a written message in them, put it this way:          "In looking through God's great stone books made of records reaching back millions and millions of years, it is a great comfort to learn that vast multitudes of creatures, great and small and infinite in number, lived and had a good time in God's love before man was created."

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Do you remember when you learned about fossils?  Is there some fossil you particularly recall?

(The photograph of the fossils is by cobalt123 and is used under a

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.)