The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (3 page)

As a kid I could stare at maps for hours, examining geographical details of places I’d never been. Seduced by the lay of the land, I grew up intrigued by how topography shaped historic battles, controlled the locations and form of cities, and forged the character of civilizations.

As a Boy Scout I loved hiking in the Sierra Nevada and the coastal mountains of California. I would follow our treks matching map to landscape, tracking the progress we’d made. Because I rarely got lost, my parents designated me navigator on family vacations through the wide-open landscapes of the American West. Driving through country with rocks laid bare or sculpted into cliffs, spires, and mesas held my attention. I would chart our route on a map, carefully noting where we were, my head swinging from the map on my lap to the landmarks out the car window and back again. What river were we following? What range were those mountains on the horizon? My love of topography and maps—my topophilia—cultivated an eye for understanding landscapes.

It wasn’t until college that I learned to recognize and name the processes behind why Earth’s surface looks as it does, and how to read the signature of erosion and deposition in shaping landscapes. Most people see the land as static. I learned to see it as ever-changing.

Now, wherever I am in the world I look to the shape and arrangement of hillslopes and valleys, mountains and rivers, to read the processes that shaped the land. There is something inherently beautiful about topography, in the rhythmic rise and fall of rolling hills, a soaring wall of rock rising to a rugged mountain peak, or the looping symmetry of a great river meandering across a wide-open floodplain. Coming to understand the forces that sculpt our world has nurtured the sense of wonder and beauty I find in nature. I’ve also found in my travels and expeditions that, like me, people all over the world are enthralled with and tell stories about topography.

Some of humanity’s oldest stories are about the origin of the world and its landforms. Why do volcanoes exist? How did the oceans form? When did it all begin? People have wondered about such things for about as long as they’ve been thinking. How am I sure of this? We live on Earth’s surface, and the lay of the land influences almost everything we do, all the more so if you’ve ever climbed a mountain, or found yourself in a flood, an earthquake, or near an exploding volcano. How the world was made and how it works is of interest to anyone living on Earth—which pretty much covers everybody.

After Tibet, another encounter with flood traditions made me suspect that there may be more truth to flood stories than I ever imagined. A bright spot in the tragic December 2004 tsunami that decimated Indonesia and Thailand was the remarkable tale of how the Moken people, the region’s sea gypsies, survived without casualties because they knew to run for the hills. These seafaring people had an oral tradition of a big flood that warned them to get to high ground when the tide mysteriously went out far and fast. Knowledge that it would soon come back in as a monstrous wave helped them survive, and gave them a chance to pass the story to future generations.

Could science be playing catch-up to folklore? For most of our history as a species, oral traditions were the only way to preserve knowledge. So why wouldn’t the world’s flood stories record actual ancient disasters? After all, the world’s first civilizations were agricultural societies settled along major floodplains where swollen rivers periodically submerged fields and towns. And, of course, among the best-known and most controversial flood stories is that of Noah’s Flood. Could there also be truth to the biblical tale?

Today, geologists generally dismiss Noah’s Flood with a chuckle and shrug it off as a relic of another time. But for centuries it was considered common knowledge among Christians and many natural philosophers that Noah’s Flood shaped our world. What else could have? If the planet itself was but a few thousand years old, as Christians believed the Bible implied, how could the processes we see today have possibly shaped a mountain like Everest or a place like the Grand Canyon, let alone the whole world? The work of rivers slowly grinding away at a mountain range would not add up to much even over dozens of centuries. The busted-up rocks and rough terrain of mountains were seen as the ruins of a former, once perfect world that raging floodwaters destroyed at the behest of an angry god. Topography was concrete evidence of the awesome power of divine wrath, a humbling reminder of our place in the grand scheme of things.

Throughout history, stories about catastrophic floods have been framed by conflict between orthodoxy and heresy—both religious and scientific. At first, arguments from all sides assumed that the best theories were those that could predict what was not yet known. Answers to the question of how to read the land lay rooted in how to interpret physical evidence one could bash open, kick over, or dig down into to test ideas about what should be there. Theories could be tested against evidence.

In Sunday school I learned that Bible stories were parables to be read more for their moral message than their literal words. The story of Noah’s Flood taught mankind to be stewards of the environment—to care for all parts of nature, even as we bent her to our desires. Growing up, I was satisfied that Jesus taught how to live a good life and that science revealed how the world worked.

Through all my schooling I never thought much about conflict between science and religion. Then, in my early thirties, I met a gregarious fundamentalist on jury duty. While I was waiting to be called for jury selection, a middle-aged woman sitting next to me snuck a peek at the paper I was reading and tried to strike up a conversation: “Isn’t it amazing how Mount Saint Helens shows Noah’s Flood carved the Grand Canyon?”

I looked up, roused from an account of how the rivers draining the volcano’s flanks carved deep canyons into loose debris after the eruption. She continued, asking me if I recalled how many thousand years ago Noah’s Flood had reshaped the world. My raised eyebrows and open mouth probably telegraphed my thoughts. When I told her that a global flood was pure fiction and suggested that she might want to tack a few more zeros onto the planet’s age, she responded that only atheists believed the world was ancient. I sat there at a loss for words—something geology professors are not generally known to be. A loudspeaker calling her to jury service ended our awkward conversation.

My jury-duty mate is not alone in believing that Noah’s Flood explains nearly all of earth history. Her view is what geologists call “flood geology,” the resilient yet scientifically discredited idea that the biblical flood remodeled the planet in one fell swoop several thousand years ago. In the four hundred years since the church grounded Galileo, Christianity has grown to accept science that disproves archaic notions about our world being the center of the universe. Why should geological discoveries be treated any differently than those of astronomy?

The more I looked at the history of efforts to explain Noah’s Flood, the more I came to realize that our cultural view of a centuries-long, ongoing conflict between geology and Christianity—between science and religion—was too simplistic. The real story was far more interesting.

My curiosity about a geological basis for the biblical flood began in the 1990s, when Bill Ryan and Walter Pitman, two prominent oceanographers, suggested that the Mediterranean Sea catastrophically spilled over into a low-lying lake valley to create the Black Sea. When they proposed that this was in fact Noah’s Flood, many Christians were intrigued by scientific support for the biblical story. Creationists were outraged. Why were creationists angry when scientists claimed to find support for the biblical flood? The problem to them was that this flood was not an earth-shattering, topography-busting flood that ripped apart and reassembled the whole world. It was not the flood that they thought the Bible described. They saw the suggestion that Noah’s Flood was a regional disaster, and not a global event, as an attack on Christianity. For completely different reasons, many geologists also were immediately skeptical—hadn’t science dispelled Noah’s Flood as an ancient myth?

I thought Ryan and Pitman’s idea made sense. It was geologically plausible. Had they solved the puzzle of Noah’s Flood?

No other story has had as profound an influence on geology as that of Noah’s Flood. Today almost half of the American public believes in young Earth creationism—that the world is about six thousand years old and that Noah’s Flood reshaped Earth’s surface into today’s world a few thousand years before the time of Christ.
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While there is no doubt that the world is far older than creationists allow, it is this most fundamental feature—time—eons of it, that causes creationists to so vociferously deny modern geology. Why this reaction? Because if the world is old, it allows time not only for mountains to rise and erode but, more problematically, for evolution to work. In defending an interpretation of God’s word contradicted by geological evidence, creationists abandon a long-standing Christian belief that rocks don’t lie.

For centuries, Christians interpreted scientific discoveries through faith that God’s word (the Bible) and Creation (nature) must be consistent with one another. In combing through historical material—both geological and theological—I saw that previous generations had reconciled geological evidence with how to read the biblical story of Noah’s Flood. Although harsh rhetoric is by no means a modern invention, for centuries few considered science and religion mortal enemies. Most early geologists were clergy who believed that stories preserved in rock revealed the nature of God’s works as surely as the Bible revealed His Word. Scientifically inclined clergy had faith that discoveries about the natural world would illuminate biblical interpretation. They knew their efforts could only enhance biblical authority because a deeper understanding of the workings of nature led to a deeper understanding of God.

Exploring the history of geologic thinking about the biblical flood reveals how cultural friction generated conflict and change within both scientific and religious circles. After all, the story of Noah’s Flood provided the first geologic theory to be tested against field observations. Perplexing questions, like the origin of valleys and marine fossils found within mountains, became fodder for a grand debate over Noah’s Flood. And arguing about evidence for a global flood likewise helped shape how biblical interpretations adapted to scientific advances. Today, unraveling the origin of traditional flood stories involves not only the interpretation of foundational Judeo-Christian traditions but understanding conflict between visionaries and orthodoxy within scientific and religious establishments.

Scientifically inclined creationists tend to be engineers, chemists, and physicists with little to no geological training. Perhaps this helps explain why the creationist view of Earth as only a few thousand years old contrasts with geology textbooks based on decades of research confirming that we live on a planet that is four and a half billion years old. Rejecting conventional geology out of hand, creationists selectively interpret the rock record to support their view that Noah’s Flood deposited all the fossil-bearing rocks and sculpted the world’s topography over the course of a single year. In such a short span of time a flood of epic proportions is the only geological mechanism that could do it. It’s all creationists have that can explain earth history, and without it their intellectual house of cards comes crashing down.

Whatever you may think about evolution, the creationist belief in a several-thousand-year-old Earth shaped by Noah’s Flood is as scientifically illiterate as the idea that the Sun circles us. Both have been known to be wrong for centuries. And to embrace the creationist view of earth history is to deny Earth’s autobiography inscribed on pages of stone.

The land beneath our feet is active, changing, and moving—every day, somewhere. We simply cannot afford to ignore what we learn from geology. We use it to find oil, site and design buildings, map floodplains, and assess mineral deposits. Science is useful because it explains how the world works. This is why we place faith in it.

The history of thinking about catastrophic floods certainly features its share of conflict. Yet amid the conflict I found fertile cross-pollination between geology and Christianity. Scientific discoveries shaped creative explanations for earth history, and the interpretation of biblical stories of the Creation and Noah’s Flood framed the ideas of early geologists. The challenge of adapting biblical interpretations to accommodate geological discoveries helped shape modern Christianity, influencing both liberal and conservative thought.

Let me take you on a journey through the story of how geologists learned to read the history of the world in the rocks beneath their feet and the hills above their heads. Instead of the familiar tale of controversy over Darwin’s ideas, we’ll see how geological discoveries helped trigger a different story of evolution—that of Christian theology and the birth of modern creationism. Along the way we’ll explore how one of humanity’s fundamental traits—observing the natural and physical world around us—led to stories about unimaginable floods. You see, the stories of Noah’s Flood and the Tibetan flood are much the same, except of course that one went viral and we’re still arguing about it. We’ll also see how creationists came to consider reason in general, and geology in particular, as the enemy of faith, so much so that they could not bring themselves to accept scientific findings that seemed to corroborate biblical stories. So, like Alice heading down the rabbit hole, let’s start at the beginning.

For a geologist, the logical place to begin is in the oldest rocks buried at the bottom of the geologic record. I know of no better place to see how a geologist reads a story of rocks, topography, and time than the Grand Canyon. This stunning landscape tells a tale stretching back into deep time over an unimaginably vast expanse of earth history. Armed with a few commonsense rules to guide reading the rock record, one finds in the canyon a story of whole worlds come and gone long before the one we know. The story is laid out plain as day in the walls of the deepest hole in North America.