The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (12 page)

Two years after Halley’s address, in 1696, one of those in attendance, William Whiston, a Newton protégé and chaplain to the Bishop of Norwich, borrowed Halley’s comet for
A New Theory of the Earth
. A combination of Newtonian physics, biblical interpretation, and occasional facts, Whiston’s book also described the planet being knocked off its axis as it passed through the tail of a great comet. Whiston spun another tale from that point. Torrential rain from the comet’s atmosphere opened the floodgates of heaven. The gravitational attraction of this near miss created enormous stresses as the rocky crust stretched and contracted under the influence of subterranean tides. As the crust cracked, the combination of torrential rain and water liberated from below scoured the world’s surface. Then the floodwaters neatly drained back down into the abyss, leaving the churned-up mess to settle back into place much as Woodward had described.

Not everybody was impressed with such theories. Oxford astronomy professor John Keill published a critique of Burnet’s and Whiston’s arguments that condemned both men as “makers of imaginary worlds and loosers of imaginary floods.”
¹¹
Keill derisively labeled Burnet’s book a “
Philosophical Romance
” because an originally smooth world bathed in perpetual sunlight would be uninhabitable.
¹²

Rivers would not run on Burnet’s perfectly smooth Earth. With no slope to drive the current, rivers could not flow. They would “stagnate and stink,” making for “uncomfortable living.”
¹³
With no rain and no flowing surface water, Keill thought that the land between the foul rivers would have been more like Hades than Paradise.

And Burnet’s rocky crust could never float like clay flakes on an ocean of water. It would sink as soon as it consolidated. Besides, Keill noted, Genesis revealed that antediluvian society had iron tools, and thus Earth’s original crust must have contained iron. Yet if Burnet was right, dense iron particles would have settled rapidly down through the abyss and would never have become incorporated into the crust in the first place. Keill dismissed Burnet as a victim of excessive imagination who used clever rhetoric to charm logic to sleep.

Still, that wasn’t the biggest flaw in Burnet’s theory. Had the warmth of the Sun been able to penetrate Earth’s surface and heat the inner sea enough to crack the crust, it would have baked the planet’s surface, raising insurmountable questions about Noah’s Flood.

Certainly there could be no necessity for a Deluge in that case, except it were to cool the Earth again after such an excessive heat, which must have destroyed all the Animals, Plants, and Trees which were upon the earth, and have turned them into Glass.
¹⁴

Keill likewise demolished Whiston’s theory by showing that there would not be enough pressure in a comet’s tail to generate torrential rains. Keill further calculated that the gravitational pull of a passing comet would not deform a subterranean abyss, thereby burying yet another idea attempting to explain Noah’s Flood.

Curiously, Keill the astronomer was a deeply religious natural philosopher not inclined to rationally explain the miraculous
.
He was comfortable with the Flood’s being an event not amenable to scientific explanation. While the astronomer Keill preferred to invoke miracles to explain earth history, the cleric Burnet sought to demonstrate that it happened through natural processes.

Today, long after such fundamental ironies have been forgotten, seventeenth-century ideas still frame the essential arguments that creationists offer to reconcile geological evidence with their presumed reality of a global deluge. The key difference, of course, is that seventeenth-century philosophers did not blindly trust particular literal interpretations of scripture. They had faith reason would lead to enlightened interpretation of God’s creation, as read from the pages of the book of nature—the rocks themselves.

As natural philosophers began to better understand the universe and its workings, attitudes toward mountains underwent radical change. Long seen as ugly, inconvenient, and dangerous, the Alps became Europe’s prime tourist attraction by the end of the eighteenth century. At the same time, theologians gradually came to see mountains as beautiful natural cathedrals—spiritually uplifting examples of the magnificence of creation rather than evidence of a ruined world, the broken remnants of a wrecked paradise.

Geologists today tend to forget that the foundation of modern geology, Steno’s deceptively simple idea that younger rocks lay on top of older ones, was introduced to help explain how Noah’s Flood shaped the Italian landscape. Yet Steno’s story remains one of the best examples of the complex interplay between geology and theology, setting off and setting up debates that continue to this day. Although Steno’s greatest insight was that the present arrangement of the layers that make up our world can be used to read its history, his greatest impact was on shaping the views of generations of students he never met. The more natural philosophers applied Steno’s rules to the geologic record, the more they discovered about how the rocks revealed a much longer story than the traditional biblically inspired history of the world.

5

A Mammoth Problem

T
ODAY, GEOLOGISTS KNOW THAT
more than 99 percent of all animal species that have ever lived are extinct. You don’t have to know any geology to know that trilobites, dinosaurs, and saber-toothed tigers no longer live among us (unless you count birds as modern dinosaurs). Given this, it makes no sense to argue that Noah’s Flood explains the world’s fossils. If that were the case, it would mean the Flood not only caused extinctions but killed off almost all the world’s then living species—the very thing that Noah supposedly built his ark to prevent in the first place.

But in the opening days of the eighteenth century, naturalists and theologians alike were confident that extinctions had no place in God’s plan. Almost everyone assumed that living examples of fossils would eventually turn up as more of the world was explored. Vigorous arguments continued to rage over how God triggered Noah’s Flood, but after Steno, Burnet, and Woodward, natural philosophers increasingly interpreted internment of once-living creatures in rocks as compelling evidence of a divine disaster. After all, there was no way to know how old fossils were, no way to date when they had lived—or had died. Wasn’t the simplest answer that they had died all at once?

If the only idea you have to explain rocks and topography is a big flood, then you will naturally tend to interpret the evidence you find in terms of a big flood for as long as you can. Even scientists today are not immune to interpreting evidence, at least initially, through the lens of prevailing ideas and their preconceived notions. Centuries ago, when natural philosophers learned of fossils near the crest of the Andes, they concluded that the biblical flood parked the bones of sea creatures within South America’s highest mountains.

A problematic detail, however, muddied the waters—some fossils did not correspond to any known living species. One of the most striking fossils common in the layered (sedimentary) rocks of England were ammonites, snail-like marine animals with spiral shells characterized by distinctively crenulated partitions that created internal chambers. There was a dizzying array of different species and types of fossil ammonites, ranging in size from inches to several feet across. They were found throughout certain rock formations across southern England and were literally falling out of the cliffs to litter beaches along the English Channel. Yet nothing like them had ever been found alive anywhere in the world. Their closest living relative seemed to be pearly nautilus, an exotic chambered shell with simpler, noncrenulated partitions from the East Indies. Most natural philosophers shrugged off this problem, confident that someday someone would dredge a living ammonite up from the sea. They thought that only a flood of awesome power, the biblical flood, could have entombed on land creatures thought to live in the very deepest part of the ocean.

The views of diluvialists—those who invoked Noah’s Flood to explain what they found in the rocks—dominated geological thinking until natural philosophers demonstrated that fossils were extinct and that Earth had a much longer and more complicated history.

A leading voice of the diluvialists was Johann Scheuchzer, one of continental Europe’s great fossil enthusiasts. After completing a doctorate in medicine at Utrecht in 1694, he returned home to Zurich, where he eventually became a professor of mathematics. Insatiably curious about the natural world, Scheuchzer served as the secretary of a weekly club that held lively discussions on controversial topics such as whether the devil could physically seduce a woman and whether mountains were created along with the world or formed during Noah’s Flood.

Scheuchzer’s passionate interest in Swiss natural history led to extensive walking tours through the Alps. Accompanied by his students, he made geological observations and was the first to measure—by carrying a barometer up a mountainside—how air pressure changed with altitude. Fossils especially fascinated him. He had been taught they were mineral oddities whose origin could be explained by physics and chemistry.

When Scheuchzer read Woodward’s essay, he realized that fossils really were ancient creatures. Right under his nose, entombed in his own rock collection, were the remains of snails, seashells, fishes, and plants. This revelation prompted his own landmark work in 1708,
The
Fishes’ Complaint and Vindication
, in which Scheuchzer lampooned the still popular idea that fossils were inorganic objects that just happened to resemble real creatures. He shaped his narrative from the point of view of a fossil fish who complained in formal Latin about not being recognized as an innocent victim of the flood sent to destroy mankind.

“We, the swimmers, voiceless though we are, herewith lay our claim before the throne of Truth. We would reclaim what is rightly ours… . Our claim is for the glory springing from the death of our ancestors… carried on the waves before the Flood… . We bear irrefutable witness to the universal inundation.”
¹

Scheuchzer’s fossil narrator righteously demanded the dignity of being recognized as having suffered alongside mankind during the Flood. Speaking for innocent marine creatures that died when receding floodwaters stranded them on dry land, it added insult to injury to deny that their own bones testified to their existence. The fossilized spokesman introduced detailed illustrations of marine fossils that any fisherman would recognize as the remains of familiar animals.

The year after his fossil fishes spoke up, Scheuchzer published
Herbarium of the Deluge
, a collection of botanical prints illustrating plant life purportedly fossilized as a result of the Flood. This collection of striking images showed exotic plants set in stone, offering a window into a world before our own. That ferns and tropical plants had been growing in Europe drew open the curtain of time to reveal a radically different world.

Seduced by what he saw as fossilized postcards of life before the Flood, Scheuchzer kept looking for more flood victims. The limestone quarry at Oenigen, in the Alps near the west end of Lake Constance, gave him access to fossil fish, bullfrogs, snakes, and even turtles. He saw these fossils, now known to date from the Miocene epoch (ten to twenty million years ago), as relics of Noah’s Flood deposited along with the rest of the world’s sedimentary rocks. Then in 1725 stone workers at the quarry unearthed part of an unusually large skeleton and shipped it off to Scheuchzer, who promptly interpreted it as another flood victim. What better testimony to the veracity of the biblical flood than the bones of a drowned sinner?

Naming this unlucky fellow
Homo diluvii testis
(man who testifies to the Flood), Scheuchzer sent off descriptions of his incredible find to British, French, and German journals and published a short book that shared the fossil’s name. Scheuchzer’s discovery of a human witness to the Flood not only showed that a world of sinners drowned but that they were giants, just like the Bible implied when it said “there were giants in the earth in those days” (Genesis 6:4). Scheuchzer had a ready answer for the dearth of human remains in the rocks laid down by the Flood. The bones of innocent animals were to remind us of their sacrifice, whereas the rarity of human remains confirmed that sinners deserved condemnation to eternal oblivion.

Convinced he had found proof of Noah’s Flood, Scheuchzer spent his last years compiling his
Sacred Physics
, in which he sought to harmonize natural history with scriptural truths. He proposed that the fountains of the deep had burst forth when the hand of God literally reached out and applied the brakes to Earth’s rotation, stopping the world dead in its tracks, splitting continents apart and spilling out subterranean seas to produce the biblical flood.