The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (28 page)

None of the arguments for asserting that mammoths died in a great catastrophe survived twentieth-century scrutiny. Creationists didn’t seem to notice.

Concerned over growing antagonism toward science in their community, evangelical Christians formed the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) in 1941 to promote study of the relationship between science and the Bible. One of its key members was J. Laurence Kulp, a PhD chemist from Princeton University who had mastered radiocarbon dating in Libby’s lab at the University of Chicago. He went on to become a leading authority on the method and established his own carbon dating lab at Columbia University. In an article published in 1950 in the
Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation
, Kulp attacked flood geology as an embarrassment to both science and Christianity.

Kulp’s influence helped split the ASA into two camps: old-Earth believers and young-Earth creationists. The former believe that God created the world, but at a geological pace. Bitter disagreements grew into a rift that still characterizes evangelical Christianity today as young-Earth creationists began attacking the idea of an old Earth that allowed time for evolution.

Kulp noted basic creationist errors that he thought reflected a lack of education and training among prominent advocates of flood geology, especially in the important subdisciplines of field mapping, paleontology, and structural geology. Creationists held that geology and evolution were synonymous even though the geological basis for determining the relative age of rocks did not actually rely on fossils. Creationists also claimed that the conditions under which rocks formed and deformed were not well understood. Kulp attributed the confidence of flood geologists to their sincere belief in these fallacious convictions. Finally, he charitably maintained that flood geologists were simply out of date. They relied on Price’s work, which predated the development of radiometric dating, the perforation of Earth’s sedimentary cover by oil wells, and studies that conclusively documented the conditions under which sedimentary rocks form and deform. In other words, so-called flood geologists simply didn’t know what they were talking about.

In debunking flood geology, Kulp focused on the formation of sedimentary rocks, pointing out how it was impossible for them to have all formed during a single flood. In the 1930s, cores from Venezuelan oil wells documented a complete section showing the compaction and transformation of river mud into hard shale. Penetrating through two vertical miles of muddy sediments, the drill cores revealed that loose mud had to be buried under at least a mile of sediment before it solidified into rock. A mile of water would not do the trick because the additional weight of overlying sediment was needed to squeeze water from the mud. Similar studies documented comparable results for limestone and sandstone. If sedimentary rocks now exposed at the surface all formed during the Flood, then where did the mile of sediment that must have covered them go if there was only a few thousand years to erode it all off?

Even more damning was Kulp’s discussion of the problem of how to warp layers of sedimentary rock into broad regional folds like those that characterized Appalachian geology. Creationists attributed such deformation to the slumping of Flood-deposited mud and sand, before these layers hardened into rock. Kulp described how this was physically impossible. Shell Oil Company geologists had shown that in order to reproduce geologic conditions in a laboratory setting, one had to scale all the dimensions in the model—including the material properties. Using modeling clay to experimentally investigate the deformation of rocks at temperatures and pressures equivalent to about five to ten miles down within Earth’s crust, one could easily reproduce the folding seen in sedimentary rocks. While turning loose sediment into solid rock required burial to considerable depth, folding rocks required even deeper burial and higher temperatures. Flood geology simply could not explain the world’s great expanses of folded sedimentary rock.

Kulp also described how radiometric ages of rocks determined by measuring uranium-lead ratios agree with the stratigraphic order worked out by field geologists on the basis of Steno’s principles for interpreting structure and stratigraphy. Radiometric dating confirmed the basic order to the stratigraphic record independently from the fossils sedimentary rocks contained. Price’s argument that geologists used the idea of fossil succession (and thus evolution) to impose an artificial order on the geologic record showed how little Price understood geology.

Kulp asked how if sedimentary rocks really were deposited by great waves moving at speeds up to a thousand miles an hour it would be possible to preserve the kind of ecological zonation creationists called upon to explain fossil assemblages—the idea that the different fossils that characterized different rock formations simply reflected the animal communities in different ecological zones on the pre-Flood Earth. Such a violent current would mix and remix anything ripped up from Earth’s surface. The ecological zonation that creationists invoked to explain the fossil record could not survive the flood they called upon to generate it.

One of the simplest arguments against a young age for the world’s sedimentary rocks was the amount of water that would need to be evaporated in order to account for the great thickness of evaporites, like the gypsum (calcium sulfate) deposits in Michigan and west Texas. Since less than a foot of gypsum would precipitate out of a thousand feet of seawater, Kulp calculated that it would take evaporation of an ocean 450 miles deep to build up the thick gypsum deposits of west Texas. Based on the most extreme recorded evaporation rates from the Dead Sea, he calculated this would take hundreds of thousands of years. The world’s thick evaporite beds could not have formed in the single year of Noah’s Flood.

Evidence based on completely different approaches—radioactive decay, the amount of salt in the sea, and even the relationship between the speed of light and the distance to the stars—all indicated that Earth was millions if not billions of years old.

Kulp concluded his critique of Price’s ideas by warning that pushing demonstrably false ideas would hinder the spread of the Gospel among educated people. An evangelical himself, Kulp studied chemistry until he felt the Lord call him to study geology. He was concerned that for half a century too few evangelical Christians had entered the field of geology; consequently, Price and his disciples exercised too much influence in evangelical circles, given their lack of geological knowledge.

Few mainstream Christian scholars bought into Price’s flood geology. In 1954, influential Baptist theologian Bernard Ramm critiqued creationism from an evangelical perspective
in
The Christian View of Science and Scripture
. Ramm argued against a recent global flood. He considered it ludicrous to think that people from all the world’s ethnicities could have descended from Noah in just a few thousand years.

Ramm contrasted two traditions through which Christians approached science. Those adopting the “ignoble tradition” had taken a hostile attitude toward science and “used arguments and procedures not in the better traditions of established scholarship,” whereas those following the “noble tradition” had “taken great care to learn the facts of science and Scripture.”
⁸
To set science against religion was to set creation against creator.
“
If the Author of Nature and of Scripture are the same God, then the two books of God must eventually recite the same story.”
⁹
Ramm advised evangelical Christians not to confuse interpretation with revelation. Just because the Bible was the infallible Word of God did not mean that it was always obvious as to what it meant regarding scientific matters. Confidence that one understood the clear meaning of scripture did not necessarily mean one did.

In defending radioactive dating of rocks, Ramm related how experiments under a wide range of pressures and temperatures showed no effect on the rate of radioactive decay. Radioactive isotopes changed at a constant rate. Geologists could tell how long a sample of uranium (or carbon) had been decaying in a similar way to how we could “measur[e] how much gas we have left in the tank [to get] an idea how many miles we have driven.”
¹⁰

For Ramm, the idea that Earth existed for millions of years before God reconditioned it for human use adequately reconciled Genesis and geology. In the epilogue to his book, Ramm pointed out that not only did evangelicals of his day not believe that Earth is either flat or at the center of the universe but that many considered the findings of modern geology to be perfectly consistent with their faith.

Ramm’s book caused quite a stir among fundamentalists. A leader of the self-described new evangelicals, he sought to engage modern culture, avoided belligerency, and embraced scholarship. Shortly after it was published Billy Graham praised Ramm’s book and called for a new view of biblical inspiration that respected and accommodated modern science. It seemed as though the idea of a global flood was vanquished. No serious scientist or mainstream theologian still gave it any thought. The key to accepting the fact that science and scripture could peacefully coexist lay in how one interpreted the Bible—just as it always had.

Meanwhile, twentieth-century geologists had settled into a comfortably uniformitarian worldview. Studying processes active today, they believed, was the key to understanding the worlds of the past. Anti-catastrophist views were so embedded in conventional thinking that when a young upstart discovered evidence for an enormous flood, it took most of the century for his colleagues to accept his heretical notion. But as geologists reluctantly came to appreciate, once again, the geologic role and topographic signature of catastrophic flooding, they developed a foundation for rational explanations of many of the world’s flood stories, including, some would argue, Noah’s Flood.

11

The Heretic’s Flood

I
T IS HARD TO SEE
evidence for what you’re sure cannot exist. Twentieth-century geologists were no exception to this rule. They were certain that enormous floods capable of sculpting topography were impossible. Until, that is, one of them rediscovered the ability of catastrophic floods to reshape Earth’s surface in the curious landscape of eastern Washington’s scablands, a desolate region stripped of soil.

After teaching geology at the University of Washington for a decade, I was embarrassed that I had not yet seen the deep canyons where tremendous ice age floods scoured down into solid rock to sculpt the scablands. So when colleagues asked me to help lead a field trip there, I decided it was about time I checked out this dramatic terrain. But lead a field trip to somewhere I’d never been? No thanks, I replied, how about I just tag along? When the announcement came out, I was listed as a trip leader. Clearly this was going to be educational. The question was for whom.

Geology field trips usually involve a lot of high-speed talking in low-speed vans. As the designated distraction crossing over Washington’s Cascades, I related the history of twentieth-century arguments over the timing of when the range rose to rival the Swiss Alps. Geologists working in the northern Cascades saw the range as ancient, having risen before waves of black lava flowed out from Yellowstone to cover eastern Washington fifteen to seventeen million years ago. Those working in the southern Cascades argued the range was much younger, having come up well after emplacement of the lava blanket. It turns out that there is a simple way to reconcile these fundamentally conflicting interpretations. The modern topography of the Cascade Range is a composite, the southern half rising much more recently to stand shoulder to shoulder with its elder sibling to the north. Sometimes conflict is all about perspective.

We descended the Cascades and soon entered the high desert of eastern Washington. The temperate rainforest of western Washington was miles behind us, and the lack of plants made it easy to see the landforms. Once across the Columbia River we continued eastward, driving up onto a plateau where swirling winds blew soil off freshly plowed fields. Racing the dust devils, we dropped into Moses Coulee, a canyon with vertical walls of layered basalt half buried beneath talus ramps. Nothing had removed the rocks that fell to the valley floor. They just piled up in place, right where gravity left them.

We stopped, gathered the students on a small rise, and asked them how the canyon was formed. They immediately ruled out wind and glaciers. The valley was not U-shaped like typical glacial valleys, and none of us could imagine how wind might gouge a canyon out of hard basalt. But neither did anyone see a river or stream. After a while I pointed out that we were standing on a pile of gravel and asked the class to explain how these rounded granite pebbles came to be there when the closest source of granite lay over the horizon. Silence.

Hiking through eastern Washington canyons littered with exotic boulders has long been a standard field trip for beginning geologists. It takes a while to register what you see there: the water-scoured cliff of a now dry waterfall hundreds of feet high in the middle of the desert; giant potholes where no river flows today; granite boulders parked in a basalt canyon. Gradually, the contradictions fall into place and answer the questions of where car-sized wayward boulders came from and what was the source of the water that moved them around and carved the falls. Students can conjure up eastern Washington’s giant floods once their professors give them the clues. Once you know what to look for, the evidence is hiding out in the open in plain sight. But the idea of a great flood capable of gouging deep valleys into hard rock seems unlikely in the middle of a desert, particularly when you’ve been taught that such a thing is impossible.