The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood Read Free Page 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