For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water. Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished... 2 Peter 3:5,6
"James Hutton was born in 1726 and died the year Lyell was born, in 1797. 
He was a Scotsman of no mean intellect, having graduated from the universities of Edinburgh, Leiden (Holland), and Paris.
Although Hutton had a Quaker background, the Biblical miracles were particularly disturbing to him especially that of Noah, his ark and the necessity for them by the Genesis claim that the Flood was global.
He eventually became a deist.
On the matter of origins he argued that the earth's history could best be discovered from the earth itself rather than from questionable Jewish records.
He thought that the bent and twisted rock formations and the fossil remains of extinct creatures could be more rationally explained as simply the result of natural processes over a long period of time rather than a catastrophic process all taking but a few months, as taught in the Mosaic record. Waves of the sea erode cliffs and beaches, winds wear away rocks and, it is assumed, whole mountains, given a sufficient length of time. Hutton's Theory of the Earth was published in 1795 and provided an expanded time frame that made no appeal to supernatural events for the earth's early history."
IanTaylor
