The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (20 page)

Eager to make his mark challenging catastrophists, Lyell also was keenly aware of his own need to secure a steady income. Geologizing did not pay the bills. So with an eye on securing a chair in mineralogy or geology, and not wanting to be too provocative, he kept references to the Mosaic chronology and the biblical flood to a minimum.

Lyell staked out a position opposing the habit of invoking grand catastrophes to explain geological evidence.

We hear of sudden and violent revolution of the globe, of the instantaneous elevation of mountain chains, of paroxysms of volcanic energy… . We are also told of general catastrophes and a succession of deluges, of the alternation of periods of repose and disorder, of the refrigeration of the globe, of the sudden annihilation of whole races of animals and plants, and other hypotheses, in which we see the ancient spirit of speculation revived, and a desire manifested to cut, rather than patiently to untie, the Gordian knot.
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In cataloging observations on physical processes now in operation, Lyell emphasized how erosion and uplift occur episodically. He calculated that it could take a big river like the Ganges more than seventeen centuries to carry away the tremendous mass of rock uplifted by a single great earthquake.

Lyell argued that the laws of nature governing geological processes remain constant, even though their effects vary through time. Contemporary reviewers misinterpreted this as advocating no role for catastrophes in earth history. But this was not what Lyell meant. He described the tremendous erosive power of floods resulting from the failure of topographic barriers holding back lakes, specifically linking catastrophic floods with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. With this nod to geological catastrophes, Lyell argued that processes still in operation could carry on for long enough to sculpt topography.

In dispensing with the need for divine intervention after the initial Creation, Lyell had taken one more step on the path toward full abandonment of a global flood as a geological reality. By the third volume of his
Principles
he explicitly dismissed the likelihood that a global flood ever happened. Any current capable of gouging deep valleys into hard rock would have swept away the fragile cinder cones of central France. Besides, Lyell’s reading of Genesis implied a tranquil flood rather than Buckland’s raging waters. That an olive tree remained standing demonstrated little, if any, scriptural support for erosion during the Deluge. He saw no case for a globe-wrecking flood.

Lyell suggested that a local flood could have wiped out the then inhabited world if there had been “extensive lakes elevated above the level of the ocean” in a region with “large tracts of dry land depressed below that level.”
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He went on to describe how this might occur in various places. An earthquake that breached the topographic barrier holding back Lake Superior would unleash a mighty flood down the Mississippi River valley. The low ground surrounding the Caspian Sea sat three hundred feet below the Black Sea. Breach the barrier between these inland seas and the lower basin would rapidly fill with rising water. Lyell speculated that if even deeper depressions had existed in the past, similar situations could have flooded what previously had been mountains. Here were plausible processes by which great floods might occur.

Despite his care to avoid confrontational language, the implications of Lyell’s views were not lost on the panel reviewing him for appointment to a position at King’s College in 1831, a post he desperately needed. The decision was in the hands of an archbishop, a pair of bishops, and two medical doctors, each of whom had the right to veto Lyell’s nomination. When Lyell was informed of their concern about his unorthodox convictions, he fired off a letter to explain that although it was clear that the Flood could not have covered the entire planet, there was no evidence that “the whole inhabited earth… may not have been deluged within the last 3 or 4,000 years.”
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Lyell’s artful dance worked. He got the job and made a point of quoting one of the bishops to conclude his second lecture: “it is impossible that true religion can be injured by the ascertainment and establishment of any fact… [no science] affords a greater number of illustrations of the power & wisdom exhibited in the creation than Geology.”
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To Lyell, his geology demonstrated the manifest wisdom of the Creator, which meant the challenge lay in correctly interpreting both the rocks and the Bible.

Lyell’s careful arguments and exposition mollified some, although by no means all, critics. Soon after Lyell’s book was published, Sedgwick attacked Lyell’s insistence on the uniform operation of processes through geologic time. Catastrophes were necessary to explain the deformation of strata and how ancient seabeds could be lifted up to form new land. Lyell’s carefully constructed arguments may not have worked on Sedgwick, but they began to convert Buckland.

Within a decade, new discoveries convinced Buckland that Lyell was right. The volcanic cones of central France really were compelling evidence that valleys had not been incised by a global flood. Buckland’s own fieldwork demonstrated that the drift, the great gravel sheet he had long attributed to Noah’s Flood, was not deposited in a single event. There had been several episodes of deposition involving material from different sources. In his Bridgewater treatise Buckland reveals the influence of Lyell’s
Principles
when he states that the physical laws governing geological processes were as uniform as the law of gravity governing the orbits of planets.

It was Buckland who bore the brunt of clerical attacks after his abandonment of Noah’s Flood. Conservative clergy may have seen Lyell as a godless radical, but they saw Buckland—the former champion of biblical geology—as a traitor. A new breed of scriptural geologists and clergy with limited knowledge of geological discoveries rose to defend Moses and attack Buckland. They recycled the discredited arguments of Burnet and Woodward and invoked Noah’s Flood to explain secondary rocks, fossils, and the lay of the land.

In one of the least vitriolic clerical responses to Buckland’s recantation, William Cockburn, Dean of York, claimed that there was no more to earth history than an initial six days of Creation and Noah’s Flood about a thousand years later. A clergyman known for railing against what he saw as anti-Christian scientific ideas and theories, Cockburn revived even then discredited reasoning creationists still use to defend their preferred interpretation of Genesis. He ignored the work of Hutton, Cuvier, and Lyell.

Spelling out his ideas in a pamphlet attacking Buckland’s new views, Cockburn attributed the formation of the primary rocks to the initial Creation after which primordial waters laid down the secondary rocks. Not much else happened until Noah’s Flood, which therefore had to explain the entire fossil record. The bones of giant creatures lay in the oldest strata because these animals were too heavy for the ark and had drowned. Human remains were only found in unconsolidated surface layers and not in rocks because people fled to the highest peaks. There, they drowned some time after animals too confused to flee to higher ground had already become incorporated in flood-deposited sediments. In his rush to condemn Buckland for abandoning Noah’s Flood, Cockburn simply dismissed the discoveries and evidence that had convinced the devout Buckland to abandon the idea of Noah’s Flood as a geological event. In this way, Cockburn can be viewed as among the first modern creationists.

Several years later, in 1844, Cockburn had an ideal opportunity to challenge Buckland when the British Association for the Advancement of Science met in Cockburn’s hometown of York. On the morning of the second day of the meeting, geologists flocked to witness the spectacle of Cockburn challenging their findings of the past forty years. With great composure, the stately Cockburn walked through the crowd and took the stage to stand by the society’s president. In a brief presentation he laid out a theory purporting to explain all of geology as the result of a global flood. Cockburn insisted that the world’s surface was shaped all at once. Geologists had to explain everything using Noah’s Flood, including layered rocks. There had been no extinctions. Rivers did not cut their valleys. After Cockburn sat down and the raucous laughter had died off, Sedgwick rose to deliver a stinging hour-and-a-half response attacking Cockburn’s woeful ignorance of geology in remarks characterized by an eyewitness as marked with “a scornful bitterness beyond the power of any reporter to reproduce.”
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Cockburn was not easily silenced. Immediately after the meeting, he published his address as
The Bible Defended Against the British Association
and challenged Sedgwick to explain Earth’s origin and evolution from the beginning to the present day. Opting not to answer at first, Sedgwick eventually wrote Cockburn a short note explaining that the antiquity of the world was demonstrated by unassailable geological evidence. Nothing if not persistent, Cockburn wrote Buckland and Murchison seeking to debate Earth’s age. Neither was interested. Meanwhile, Sedgwick had written a long letter to Cockburn explaining his position and requesting the favor of no reply. Ignoring this collective dismissal, Cockburn decided that geologists were just afraid to debate. So he published his ideas as a
New System of Geology
in 1849. That his book didn’t catch on surprised few but Cockburn.

Buckland was not the only famous geologist to publicly reverse course on the flood. Less than a decade after Adam Sedgwick marshaled geological observations to show how a recent catastrophe reworked Earth’s surface and deposited England’s surficial gravels, he recanted, in his last presidential address to the Geological Society of London.

There is, I think, one great negative conclusion now incontestably established—that the vast masses of diluvial gravel, scattered almost over the surface of the earth, do not belong to one violent and transitory period… . We had, in our sacred histories, the record of a general deluge. On this double testimony it was, that we gave a unity to a vast succession of phænomena, not one of which we perfectly comprehended, and under the name diluvium, classed them all together… .

Our errors were, however, natural, and of the same kind which led many excellent observers of a former century to refer all the secondary formations of geology to the Noachian deluge. Having been myself a believer, and, to the best of my power, a propagator of what I now regard as a philosophic heresy, and having more than once been quoted for opinions I do not now maintain, I think it right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation.
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With this spirited reversal, Sedgwick joined Lyell in arguing for disentangling geology from the biblical flood. It was becoming apparent that the stories in Genesis were too short and mysterious to either confirm or challenge geological theories.

In the 1830s the question was not when Noah’s Flood occurred but how many grand catastrophes the world had seen. Agreement was growing that there was more to Earth’s story than just what the Bible said. Moses did not lay it all out. Many worlds had come and gone since the dawn of time. Shortly after Buckland’s recantation, the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz explained the surficial debris and stray boulders of northern Europe. The evidence traditionally interpreted as resulting from a global flood actually recorded the action of glaciers that overran Europe during an age of ice, leaving Noah out in the cold.

By the 1850s, Christian men of science overwhelmingly believed Earth was extremely old. In the decades before Darwin, the failure of a literal interpretation of Genesis to account for earth history helped create new rifts in Christian philosophy. In the spirit of Augustine, many Christians adopted the view that geology could help guide reinterpreting biblical stories. Others, without a background in natural philosophy or geology, came to be known as scriptural geologists. They either considered a literal interpretation of the Bible paramount and geology mistaken or embraced the idea that God just made the world look old, hiding fossils in rocks back at the initial Creation. In this split lay the roots of modern creationism.

Cockburn may have failed to convince the British Association, but he was by no means a lone voice. Scriptural geologists with little to no geological training ignored problematic geological evidence, promoted discredited theories, and invoked exceptions to biblical literalism when it suited their arguments. These forerunners of modern creationists banded together against the coalescing views of ever more geologists who rejected the idea that the Creation and Noah’s Flood were all there was to earth history.

Today geologists view all processes as fair game—from slow and steady everyday change to dramatic catastrophes. It’s not one or the other, as Lyell and Cockburn both portrayed things. Over the past several centuries, generations of geologists built their ideas on top of preceding theories, disproving or reinforcing what they had heard before. In the process, they learned how everyday change really does add up to big effects—given time—and that geological catastrophes really did happen, causing mass extinctions not just once but at least five times in the history of the world.

Along the way, the tension over how to read the geologic record—whether as an unimaginably long progression of everyday events or as a series of grand disasters—has characterized the earth sciences. Misunderstanding the nature of this tension caused friction in the relationship between geology and Christianity and still fuels conflict between science and religion.

By the end of the nineteenth century, geologists had disproved a young Earth and a global flood. Archaeologists, however, had begun to unearth ancient flood deposits in the sandy floodplains of Mesopotamia, setting off new arguments for and against evidence thought to record the biblical flood. Their discoveries carried startling implications about the age and origins of the biblical flood story.