The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (11 page)

Taking his cue from natural philosophers, Burnet did not invoke divine intervention to explain Noah’s Flood. He called upon divine planning. Using reason to explain the origin of both the world and the modern landscape, he used scripture to confirm rather than define his story. “We are not to suppose that any truth concerning the Natural World can be an Enemy to Religion; for Truth cannot be an Enemy to Truth, God is not divided against himself.”
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Burnet considered it a sign of divine providence that the world was set up to trigger a flood at just the right time. His bold theory was widely hailed as a philosophical triumph.

Burnet sent an advance copy of his book to Isaac Newton, soliciting his comments. In reply, Newton cautioned that Genesis shouldn’t be interpreted literally and that Moses described reality in terms understandable to the common man. Newton even proposed an unusual theory of his own to explain how hills and mountains might have precipitated out of a chaotic primordial fluid: “Milk is as uniform a liquor as the chaos was. If beer be poured into it, and the mixture let stand till it be dry, the surface of the curdled substance will appear as rugged and mountainous as the earth in any place.”
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Newton was particularly troubled by how, according to Burnet’s theory, the oceans did not exist until after the Flood. If so, fish and other marine life could not have been made at the Creation. This would have required a second round of creation not mentioned in the Bible. And that was unthinkable.

Burnet’s grand theory had more unorthodox implications. In particular, the problem of how Noah’s descendants came to populate America after the Flood was difficult to reconcile with Burnet’s broken planet. In contrast, it was easy to explain how they made it to America before the Flood—they walked. So he proposed that although Native Americans were descended from Adam, Columbus was the first of Noah’s progeny to reach America. Like Noah, a few people survived the Flood on other continents. Backed into this awkward claim, Burnet abandoned literal interpretation of scripture to save his theory, which was based on just such an interpretation.

Despite the problems with Burnet’s theorizing, his
Sacred Theory of the Earth
attracted so much attention that King William III had it translated from Latin into English, bringing accolades and opportunities Burnet’s way. Appointed chaplain to the king, Burnet seemed sure to become primate of the Anglican Church. But the Church of England forced him into early retirement when he rashly suggested that the Fall and the days of Creation were meant allegorically rather than literally.

Critics were quick to point out that since there could be no ocean on Burnet’s smooth pre-Flood Earth, there should be no marine fossils in rocks that formed before Noah’s Flood. Marine fossils should only be found in younger post-Flood deposits. Yet such fossils were widely distributed through the rocks that Burnet claimed formed as part of Earth’s original shell, and only later fell into the subterranean sea. Were Burnet right, this could not be.

And how did sea creatures come to exist without a second round of Creation if the oceans formed during the Deluge? Could Adam have been given dominion over the fish in the sea in an oceanless world? Herbert Croft, the aging Bishop of Hereford, labeled Burnet’s theory a work of “extravagant fancies and vain fopperies” and speculated that perhaps “his Brain is crakt with over-love of his own Invention.”
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Although he saw his theory as consistent with biblical teaching, Burnet was not simply trying to reconcile faith and reason. He was trying to prove that reason offered an independent source of revelation coequal to and compatible with scripture.

’Tis a dangerous thing to ingage the authority of Scripture in disputes about the Natural World, in opposition to Reason; lest Time, which brings all things to light, should discover that to be evidently false which we had made Scripture to assert.
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Burnet’s grand theory did not fare well among natural philosophers, but it did spawn numerous alternative theories.

Notable among these was John Woodward’s influential
Essay Toward a Natural History of the Earth
, published in 1695. In contrast to the saintly Steno, Woodward was by all accounts a self-promoting prima donna. Widely despised, but a genius in his own opinion, he was paranoid and uncharitable toward competitors and dismissive and unforgiving of critics. Famously vain, he reportedly had mirrors placed throughout his house so as to maximize opportunities to gaze upon himself.

Born in a Derbyshire village, Woodward apprenticed to a London linen draper. The king’s physician noticed him there and virtually adopted the bright young man, eventually supporting his education and medical training. After receiving a doctorate from Cambridge, Woodward was appointed professor of medicine at London’s Gresham College at the age of twenty-seven.

Woodward made his mark in natural history after he chanced upon shellfish entombed in solid rock in a Gloucestershire field. How sea creatures came to be encased in rock mystified him. Vowing to pursue an answer to the remotest parts of the kingdom, Woodward visited quarries and mines across Britain, noting anything memorable he came across and amassing a tremendous fossil collection. He sent off letters to natural philosophers inquiring about whether strata around the world contained fossils right up to the highest peaks. The same year he was appointed professor of medicine, he was elected to the Royal Society on the strength of his growing reputation as a fossil expert. So far, Woodward was building an impressive career.

The following year, in 1695, he published his essay
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arguing that the Flood dissolved Earth’s primitive crust, leaving no trace of the original world. Adopting Steno’s principles, Woodward’s ideas and the evidence he offered to back them up came from studying Britain’s rocks and fossils. Convinced that fossils were the remains of organisms that perished in the Flood, he was more concerned with what the event accomplished than in how it came about.

Woodward was one of many natural historians whose homeland’s landforms and geological features figured prominently in their thinking. It’s no chance happening that English savants greatly influenced the explanation of fossil life. Their country, and much of its well-exposed coastline, is rich with fossils. I have no doubt that my own geological perspective on big floods would be quite different had I only stayed within several hundred miles of where I grew up in northern California and had never seen wonders like the Tsangpo Gorge and the Grand Canyon.

A good scientist also draws on the experience and observations of others, and despite his famous arrogance, Woodward borrowed Steno’s idea that all strata were deposited as great horizontal sheets. He, too, argued that one could read the history of deformation from the orientation of formerly flat-lying rock. Like Steno, Woodward thought that topography formed during the same event that disrupted the rocks. Convinced that the only true philosophy was based on careful observation, he believed that his account of earth history confirmed that a great flood reshaped the world.

In Woodward’s day, many natural philosophers accepted the idea that a mighty flood burst forth from a subterranean abyss. In keeping with then conventional wisdom, Woodward invoked a violent torrent to rip up and dissolve the planet’s entire crust, mix it up, and suspend it in the raging waters. As the Flood receded, dense stuff settled out first, followed by lighter stuff. This resurfacing created the modern world, leaving fossils set in the resolidified detritus after the show was over.

To Woodward the problem was what triggered wholesale dissolution of Earth’s surface. Inverting Newton’s recognition that gravity held solid bodies together, he proposed that a temporary suspension of gravity dissolved the world into a chaotic mass. If God just flicked gravity off and then on again, it would create an instant deluge. Things settled out when gravity turned back on, sorted by weight into distinct layers—like those seen in rocks. Organic fibers, the very fabric of nature, would hold plant and animal tissue together, allowing fossils to remain intact in the resolidified earth. Then, after the Flood, some of the new layers settled and others rose, forming modern topography.

Woodward also appreciated the theological implications of a remodeled world. Foremost to him was how it revealed the second half of God’s plan: “ ’Tis very plain that the Deluge was not sent only as an Executioner to Mankind: but that its prime Errand was to Reform and New-mold the Earth.”
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Before the Flood, the world was incredibly fertile, a perfect Eden where one need not plow or even plant to reap nature’s bounty. But with idle hands having led to humanity’s downfall, it made sense that God would remake the world into a place of no free rides, where eking out an existence required constant labor. Destroying the world, and mankind along with it, was the ultimate act of kindness.

For the Destruction of the Earth was not only an Act of the profoundest Wisdom and Forecast, but the most monumental Proof, that could ever possibly have been, of Goodness, Compassion, and Tenderness, in the Author of our Being.
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For naturalists, Woodward’s theory improved upon Burnet’s in that it explained how fossils came to be incorporated into rocks. Still, Woodward caught even more flack than Burnet because he made a simple testable prediction—what we today consider a hallmark of good science. If Woodward was right, then the rocks and fossils within them would be ordered from densest on the bottom to lightest on top, reflecting the order in which things settled out.

Critics quickly pointed out how the heaviest fossils were often found on the surface rather than deep underground. Some objected to Woodward’s idea of a turbulent globe-dissolving flood when the sedimentary strata it supposedly deposited showed signs of having settled down through tranquil water.

Woodward was considered brilliant by some, but his arrogance and habit of making enemies contributed to his undoing. In 1697, London physician John Arbuthnot gleefully skewered him in
An Examination of Dr. Woodward’s Account of the Deluge
. It not only laid out problems with Woodward’s theory but showed that the great blowhard had plagiarized Steno. Arbuthnot paired sections of Steno’s obscure book with virtually identical sections from Woodward’s popular essay. In passage after passage, Woodward had cribbed Steno without acknowledging his source. As it turned out, exposure of this act of intellectual theft helped promote Steno’s ideas.

Arbuthnot’s devastating critique stamped Woodward’s account of the biblical flood as contrary to the laws of nature
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How could the Flood have been violent enough to churn up and dissolve the entire surface of the world, and yet preserve both marine life and delicate plant fossils? Besides, Woodward’s assertion that rocks and fossils were arranged on the basis of specific gravity was wrong. Arbuthnot himself had descended into a two-hundred-foot-deep pit in Amsterdam and found the density of the layers to be variable and not ordered by depth. Contrary to Woodward’s theory, heavy layers lay on top of lighter ones. Fellows of the Royal Society of London corroborated Arbuthnot’s findings, reporting that it was common to find denser strata overlying lower-density rocks.

Arbuthnot even conducted laboratory tests to disprove Woodward’s basic contention, finding that when an oyster shell and an equal weight of metal powder were dropped into a tank of water, the oyster shell sank to the bottom first. His simple experiment showed that size and shape influenced how fast things settled. Arbuthnot calculated that Woodward needed a flood 450 miles deep to turn the world into a slurry of half earth and half water, a scenario he ridiculed with dry wit: “The Doctor should have calculated the Proportions of his Drugs before he mix’d them.”
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Just as with Burnet, Woodward’s critics eventually took his theory down. That the rocks did not back up his story earned Woodward the distinction of having proposed one of the first grand geological theories to be formally refuted.

There was no shortage of subsequent fantasylike theories of the Flood, including one from astronomer Edmund Halley involving his namesake Halley’s comet. When his predicted return of a comet to European skies came true in September 1682, the popularity of comets surged among both the general public and natural philosophers. Two years later, Halley read a pair of papers to the Royal Society in which he argued that in dictating Genesis to Moses, God left out most of earth history. Fossils found far above the sea convinced Halley, like many before him, that the biblical flood was indeed global. Noting that God used natural means to carry out His will, and that forty days and nights of rain could not possibly submerge the highest mountains, Halley proposed that the shock from a comet passing close by Earth knocked the world off its axis, sending the oceans sloshing back and forth across the continents. The resulting devastation heaved the seafloor up into great piles, forming mountains and carving the topography we know today.

Even if the forty inches of rain that typically fell in a year in England’s wettest counties instead fell each day for forty days and nights, it would only inundate coastal lowlands. So Halley drummed up another source in an act of God. A great vapor canopy God had originally placed above the firmament to enshroud the primordial Earth collapsed and dropped enough water to account for Noah’s Flood. Three centuries later the founders of modern creationism resurrected this highly imaginative idea as their own vapor canopy theory.

Halley’s second paper presented far more radical ideas. Maybe the comet hit more than four thousand years ago. Maybe such global calamities occurred many times in the past, and might even recur in the future. Periodic catastrophes might even be necessary to refresh Earth’s surface once soils eroded and could no longer support life. He admitted to struggling with the theological implications of a world designed to require periodic destruction, and was terrified of what the church might think of his views. Less brave than Galileo, Halley refused to publish his papers and instead deposited them in the Royal Society’s archives, with the proviso that they be published after his death.