ABSTRACT
Geology, as understood today, is a science that seeks to provide a history of the earth. It does so by examining minerals, rocks, and fossils. By investigating how they are arranged in the earth’s crust, geologists endeavor to piece together a historical account of how the crust was formed and what the planet’s past conditions were like. Geological inquiry involves fieldwork. It also deploys the results of laboratory investigations, which may attempt, for example, to simulate conditions in the earth’s interior, model processes of geological change, or analyze and synthesize rocks and minerals artificially. Geologists attempt to understand the structure and behavior of the earth as a whole by formulating theories based on observations of surface features, as well as by the analysis, for example, of vibrations produced by earthquakes and the earth’s magnetic properties. Geologists consider the earth to be about 4.5 billion years old, and some theorists (a minority) concern themselves with ideas about the planet’s origin and its place in the cosmos. The subject, therefore, overlaps to some extent cosmology, cosmogony, and astronomy. Except in its cosmological aspects, and its use of evolutionary theory to account for the fossil record, geology today does not have much interaction with theology. Geology emerged from earlier sciences such as mineralogy toward the end of the eighteenth century.
