The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (33 page)

In reality, the most basic aspect of the geological time scale is superposition, Steno’s old idea about which rocks are above or below which other rocks. That fossil succession tracks this order has been confirmed rather than assumed. Stratigraphic relationships are strikingly clear in places like the Grand Canyon where we began our story. One does not need to look at the fossil record to understand which formation lies where in the sequence exposed in the canyon walls.

Whitcomb and Morris pointed to places where older fossil assemblages lay above younger ones as evidence that geologists just made up the stratigraphic column to fit the preconceived idea of fossil succession. But their argument ignores both regional structural mapping, which can track the deformation of folded and faulted beds across the landscape, and well-known ways to determine independently whether sedimentary beds are right side up or upside down—like how the orientation of ripple marks in sand beds or mud cracks in fine-grained rocks reveal the top and bottom of sedimentary rocks. In places where older strata lie on top of younger strata one consistently finds evidence of either folding or thrust faulting, such as upside-down beds, the fault plane itself, or a broken hash of sheared and crushed rock along the fault zone. None of these relationships depends in the slightest on the nature of the fossils that the rocks contain.

Additional ways to tell whether strata are right side up or upside down include the orientation of raindrop craters, graded bedding that records the settling out of different grain sizes (coarser material settles faster and ends up at the base of a deposit), and the orientation of burrows, which obviously extend down from what was then the surface into a deposit because overlying strata did not yet exist.

The very existence of upside-down strata presents a fatal problem for flood geology. How could sediments settle out upside down during a flood unless gravity were somehow simultaneously switching back and forth during it? If nothing much happened since the Flood, how did geological formations it laid down get flipped upside down? In contrast, given enough time, geological deformation along faults could invert rocks or shuffle the deck of rock formations as continents collided or ground past one another.

As if such concerns were not enough, fossilized coral reefs really provide the nail in the coffin for flood geology. Whitcomb and Morris explain fossil reefs found in the geologic record as ripped up and deposited along with everything else during the Flood. But if you actually go out and look at ancient reefs, as I did at my undergraduate field camp, you find that they are not composed of randomized chunks mixed up in the chaotic detritus of a violent deluge. Instead you generally find a massive limestone core, sometimes with delicate corals still in growth position. Whole reefs are preserved along with the associated lagoons, fore-reef and back-reef zones, and open-water marine environments right where you’d expect to find them in relation to one another in a modern reef. Preserving the spatial arrangement of different parts of a coral reef while ripping it to pieces and flinging them around the globe presents a logical absurdity.

Ignoring the equally awkward question of how Noah could have accommodated a coral reef on the ark, we can readily examine how long it must have taken to form modern reefs after Whitcomb and Morris’s hypothesized Flood, which would have killed off living corals in a slurry of sediment-laden water. Individual corals grow at most about half an inch per year, but reefs generally grow just millimeters a year because surf incessantly pounds them. Even assuming an unreasonably generous centimeter per year growth rate, living reefs more than 1,000 meters thick would require more than 100,000 years to grow.

Additional fatal flaws have been identified in Whitcomb and Morris’s ideas. Problems with their vapor canopy shrouding the early earth in a mild and uniform climate include the awkward issue that suspending even just a third of the water in the modern oceans as a vapor canopy would result in atmospheric pressure at the ground surface great enough to flatten living things like pancakes. The associated greenhouse effect would have led to runaway warming, producing a climate more like Hades than paradise.

Finally, although the Bible does not say a word about sedimentary rock or fossils, Whitcomb and Morris’s own logic refutes flood geologists’ central claim that sedimentary rocks did not exist before the Flood. A literal reading of the Bible requires that such rocks already existed at the time of the Flood because bitumen, the pitch or tar Noah used to caulk the ark (Genesis 6:14), comes from sedimentary rock.

Instead of grappling with these dilemmas, Whitcomb and Morris focused on challenging uniformitarianism, which they saw as the foundation for the greater evil of evolution. But they misunderstood Lyell’s argument, thinking it claimed that things had always been just as they are, rather than that the underlying physical laws were constant. In Lyell’s view, if you wanted to understand the types of deposits that a global flood would leave behind, you’d start by studying the deposits left by big floods. He was trying to develop a sound methodological basis for geology. Bizarrely, after ranting about how Lyell hypnotized generations of geologists, Whitcomb and Morris turned around and adopted his uniformitarian approach in arguing that hydrodynamic forces acted on the debris churned up by the Flood to sort it all out into fossil-bearing strata.

Christian reaction to
The Genesis Flood
was mixed. Some evangelical magazines praised it for its defense of Genesis, but even Whitcomb admitted that most evangelicals he knew accepted the reality of an old Earth. Yet, the book proved wildly popular among the fundamentalist rank and file, revitalizing flood geology and spawning modern creationism.

Why did Whitcomb and Morris’s young-Earth creationism resonate so loudly among fundamentalists? One critic suggested that it was appealing because, unlike previous creationist books, it included footnotes and looked scholarly. Their emphasis on a plain-sense meaning of the Bible also allowed Whitcomb and Morris to present themselves as more faithful to the Bible than those who reconciled it with science through reinterpretations such as the day-age and gap theories. Their flood geology did not require them to interpret days as meaning ages or to invoke unmentioned gaps in the biblical narrative. According to Whitcomb and Morris, the Bible simply said what it meant—simply. The way they read the Bible appealed to fundamentalists.

They also gained supporters because after generations of self-imposed separatism their audience was almost entirely ignorant of modern geology. And their book appeared just as fundamentalist outrage grew heated over the widespread introduction of high school textbooks that included accounts of evolution in the post-Sputnik attempt to modernize American science education.

Whitcomb and Morris drew a direct line from geology through evolution to the communism they saw threatening Christian America. A century earlier, at the funeral of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels invoked Darwin, crediting Marx for the discovery of the law of economic evolution. A century later, Whitcomb and Morris saw their world under threat from the rise of what they considered an amoral scientific elite that had abandoned Christianity and joined the effort to promote the socialist ideal of the common good. Geology and the evolution it supported lay at the root of the decay of modern society. Like communists, geologists, they believed, must be stopped.

Morris went on to found the Institute for Creation Research, which promotes flood geology to a lay audience through glossy publications and public lectures. With its slick propaganda machine, the Institute spearheaded the rise of young-Earth creationism and continues to influence evangelical thought.

In the mid-1960s a geologist named Davis A. Young appeared to offer Morris a ray of hope in his campaign to upend the geological establishment. The son of an eminent Old Testament scholar, Young studied geological engineering at Princeton in the late 1950s, where he flirted with accepting uniformitarianism. After enrolling in a master’s program in mineralogy at Pennsylvania State University, Young read
The Genesis Flood
and became convinced that geologists needed to, once again, seek evidence in support of the Flood. Taking up the challenge, he started a PhD program at Brown University, but by 1969 he confessed to Morris that he no longer believed in a global flood. Still deeply committed to scriptural inerrancy, Young became a leading evangelical critic of young-Earth creationism.

In 1972, Morris’s disappointment turned to anger when Young published a letter in a Presbyterian magazine warning that geologically illiterate creationists threatened the credibility of Christianity. Five years later, in his book
Creation and the Flood
(1977), Young went a step further and accused creationists of advocating junk science and criticized the American Scientific Affiliation for going too far in promoting biblical reinterpretation. Hoping to lead evangelical Christians to middle ground, he echoed nineteenth-century theologians in correlating earth history to the sequence of events reported in Genesis and interpreting the creation week as a figurative week in which the seventh day is ongoing.

Pointing out discrepancies in the genealogical listings presented in different books of the Bible,
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Young maintained that the
obvious interpretation of Scripture may not always be the correct one. He held that a careful reading of the Bible revealed no fundamental conflict between science and Christianity.

The Christian scientist is not compelled to reject the concept of the general development of the universe in accordance with physical, chemical, geological, and biological laws and processes formed by God at the very beginning and continuing to the present time.
⁷

Young accused flood proponents like Whitcomb and Morris of relying on untested speculations rooted in pure imagination and maintained that the failure of both the scientific community and mainstream theologians to engage in explaining the biblical deluge helped flood geology remain popular. Young also complained that Christians who defend traditional ideas of the Flood were too quick to appeal to miracles to help them evade scientific difficulties. It was telling how those seeking to support a global deluge consistently claimed as much scientific support as they could marshal and then invoked miracles when their own explanations broke down.

Another awkward problem for creationists lay in their claims that Noah’s Flood deposited the world’s sedimentary rock and that Noah landed his ark on Mount Ararat. Creationists can’t have it both ways: the geologic map of Turkey shows that the stratovolcanoes forming Mount Ararat are built upon and are therefore younger than a whole series of sedimentary rocks. If the mountain itself postdates the Flood, how could Noah have landed on it? Mount Ararat itself eloquently refutes the claim that Noah’s Flood was responsible for laying down all the world’s sedimentary rock.

Before I read
The Genesis Flood
for myself I had been mystified as to how Whitcomb and Morris could in good faith advocate the discredited ideas that revived modern creationism. But I now see that they latched onto questions for which geologists lacked compelling answers.

In the late 1950s, geologists did not have satisfying explanations either for the relationship of continents to one another or for the origin of mountains. Nineteenth-century scientists generally thought that the breakup of the continents happened early on in earth history. Mountains were thought to have formed as the originally molten planet cooled and contracted. Continents formed in the places in which they were still found, their edges crinkling up into mountains. But the discovery that the radioactive decay of minerals produced substantial heat contradicted the theory that Earth was cooling. And no cooling meant no contracting.

Others had accepted Hutton’s explanation for mountain formation. The deposition of thick sequences of sediment heated the bottom of the pile enough that its weight converted material at the bottom to rock. Somehow the heating of the sediment pile then caused uplift that formed mountains. But the discovery that oceanic crust was made of dense basalt, whereas continents were made of lighter granitic crust, meant that heating up an ocean basin couldn’t turn it into a continent. Hutton’s conception of the immense depth of geologic time fared better than his mountain-building theory. What then could explain the existence of mountains and the arrangement of continents?

A German meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, was the first to propose continental drift. He argued that the continents slowly moved around, sometimes colliding to join together and other times breaking apart. He thought that all the continents were originally joined in the supercontinent of Pangea (all Earth) that gradually rifted apart several hundred million years ago.

Like Bretz’s flood, Wegener’s unsettling idea of wandering continents was widely ridiculed when first proposed. He offered no mechanism to explain how continents split apart and then how later the pieces could come back together. His argument was based on biogeography, the global distribution of plants, animals and fossils, and the supposition that the presence of tropical fossils at high latitudes could be due to continents moving across climate zones. Similar types of fossils were found in ancient rocks on continents that have few modern species in common, which suggested the separation of once connected landmasses.

Most American geologists did not believe that Earth’s crust could withstand the compressional forces required to move continents around. At a 1928 symposium held to debate the idea of continental drift, one eminent geologist accused Wegener of cherry-picking facts that supported his idea and ignoring facts and principles opposed to it. Another complained that for Wegener to be correct geologists would have to “forget everything which has been learned in the last 70 years and start all over again.”
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The conventional idea of stationary continents and ocean basins as ancient features worked well enough so that geologists did not believe they had to start from scratch in trying to explain earth history.