The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (18 page)

Again, Cuvier led the way in elaborating the power and dynamism of geological processes in his 1825
Discourse on the Revolutions of the Globe
. He made the case that distinctive animals lived during different epochs of earth history and described how abrupt discontinuities between geological formations with different fossil assemblages testified to periodic catastrophes having remodeled the world. In his view, the most recent catastrophe was a sudden flood that separated the relatively short history of humanity from the depths of geologic time. Cuvier’s contention that one could not explain the geologic record solely by means of existing causes—that the processes that shaped Earth’s surface were different in the past—became known as catastrophism, and stood in direct contrast to Hutton’s articulation of how things happened gradually through many small changes, a view that became known as uniformitarianism.

Cuvier’s idea of periodic cataclysms seemed to address otherwise perplexing observations. His compelling evidence for the repeated destruction of former worlds inspired geologically literate clergy to reinterpret Genesis. As early as 1816 the Stackhouse Bible cautioned readers, “Moses records the history of the earth only in its present state… . There is nothing in the sacred writing forbidding us to suppose that [fossils] are the ruins of a former earth.”
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Fossils now belonged to numerous ancient catastrophes. Geological evidence was starting to shape biblical interpretation.

A prominent Protestant, Cuvier did little to counter the impression that the most recent of his long series of grand catastrophes was the biblical flood. He asserted it could not have been all that ancient: “If there is any circumstance thoroughly established in geology, it is that the crust of our globe has been subjected to a great and sudden revolution, the epoch of which cannot be dated much farther back than five or six thousand years ago.”
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He thought that a small number of people and animals survived the most recent cataclysm, about the time conventionally ascribed to Noah’s Flood.

Those seeking geological support for the biblical flood now looked to the sediments on top of the rocks, assuming Noah’s Flood was a more recent catastrophe than the geological revolutions recorded in hard rock. The most influential nineteenth-century diluvialist was William Buckland, a minister in the Church of England and Oxford’s first professor of geology. He passionately defended the traditional view of Noah’s Flood but acknowledged that the six days of Creation could not be taken literally. The son of a clergyman, Buckland knew that geology would instantly become a respectable science if he could show that it validated the Genesis flood.

A man of his times, Buckland straddled both worlds—those of the church and field geology. He wanted to forge links between human history as recorded in classical texts and biblical stories and earth history as revealed by geology. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that Moses disregarded most of earth history because it did not concern mankind.

Confident of the reality of Noah’s Flood, Buckland saw its signature in the sculpting of topography and the geologically recent deposition of the blanket of gravel covering much of Britain. He saw geological evidence as supporting the universality of the Deluge. What else could explain the giant out-of-place boulders in northern Europe from Norway to the Alps? Made of rock with no local source, boulders the size of barns had obviously been transported from distant sources. A really big flood seemed like the only reasonable way to explain how to move huge rocks. Lacking reasonable alternatives, Buckland and his contemporaries attributed the deposition of the gravel blanket and transport of enormous boulders to great waves during the biblical flood.

In his 1819 inaugural address at Oxford, Buckland equated Cuvier’s most recent catastrophic inundation with Noah’s Flood.

The grand fact of an universal deluge at no very remote period is proved on grounds so decisive and incontrovertible, that, had we never heard of such an event from Scripture, or any other, authority, Geology of itself must have called in the assistance of some such catastrophe, to explain the phenomena of diluvian action which are universally presented to us, and which are unintelligible without recourse to a deluge exerting its ravages at a period not more ancient than that announced in the Book of Genesis.
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Although the remains of modern species buried in the surficial gravels pointed to a recent calamity, Buckland did not believe that Noah’s Flood formed fossil-bearing rocks. To find evidence of the Flood you had to look in the overlying unconsolidated sediments and at the lay of the land, the form of topography.

In Buckland’s opinion, Europe’s surficial gravel was too extensive to have been laid down by rivers. He thought the Flood simultaneously deposited it and carved the modern landscape from older rocks. Buckland coined the term diluvium to describe the surficial deposits that mantled much of northern Europe and to distinguish them from alluvium, the sand and gravel laid down by modern rivers. He remained disturbed, however, that no human fossils had been found in diluvium. Where were the bones of those the Flood was sent to destroy?

Despite this troubling detail, Buckland stressed that geological facts were broadly consistent with the biblical account because Noah’s Flood ushered in only the most recent of a long succession of worlds. Buckland’s lecture, published as
Vindiciae Geologicae; or, the Connexion of Geology with Religion Explained
, argued that geological facts “are consistent with the accounts of the creation and deluge recorded in the mosaic writings… . The evidences afforded by Geological phenomena may enable us to lay more securely the very foundations of Natural Theology.”
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The “Natural Theology” to which Buckland referred followed William Paley’s popular and influential 1802 book of the same name. Paley argued that scientific revelations contradicting biblical interpretations provided natural guidance for better interpreting scripture because the Bible and the book of nature shared the same author. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, even Pope Pius VII endorsed viewing the six days of Creation as of indeterminate length rather than as a literal week of twenty-four-hour days. A little more than a decade after publication of Paley’s popular book, in 1813, English geologist Robert Bakewell sought to reconcile the geological and biblical chronologies in his
Introduction to Geology
, the first geological textbook published in English, arguing that the Mosaic chronology began when the world became fit for human habitation.

Others argued that a long time passed between the initial Creation in the first verse of Genesis and the formless Earth of the second verse. Perhaps the time between when God created the world long ago and when he remodeled it for human use wasn’t recorded in the Bible, leaving an indeterminate gap between the first two verses of Genesis. The gap theory, as this idea became known, provided an alternative to the day-age theory that each day of creation lasted far longer than twenty-four hours.

Two centuries ago, Christian scholars adapted how they read the Bible to account for geological revelations. And why not? The history of the world that geologists had found in the rocks followed the order of events described in Genesis—an initial period of time without life, followed by the introduction of plants and animals, and eventually people. If the days of Creation referred not to a single week of breakneck change but to a long series of geological ages, the problem that more than six days was needed to account for prehistory became an interpretive detail that did not imperil scriptural authority. Nowhere, Buckland asserted, did Genesis contradict the idea that the modern world was built upon the ruins of prehuman worlds. With one foot in the newborn profession of geology and the other in Anglican orthodoxy, Buckland was a man of deep conviction and few doubts.

Most geologists love the field aspect of our work, and Buckland appears no different. He went on field excursions across Britain and Europe, accompanying natural philosophers he visited and in the company of those visiting him. He traced the occurrence of durably hard yet smoothly rounded quartzite pebbles in surficial gravels from Oxford north to Warwickshire. There, he found these distinctive pebbles eroding from outcrops of conglomerate, rock formed when gravel and sand were buried deep enough to turn back into solid rock. This unusual formation was known as pudding stone due to the resemblance of the gravel set in a sand matrix to plums in a Christmas pudding. Through his geological sleuthing, Buckland reasoned that the quartzite pebbles had to have been rounded before being incorporated into the conglomerate. He thought that a great flood then ripped the distinctive pebbles back out of the rock, strewing them down the Thames all the way to London.

Buckland claimed that a great flood provided a better explanation for the distribution of the diluvial gravels than did other ideas—modern rivers were too small to account for regionally extensive gravel sheets or to move the largest boulders found in the deposits. And what at the time seemed like an apparently global distribution of similar deposits was thought to demonstrate that a geologically recent flood had affected the surface of the entire world. Again, Buckland was confident that a great flood provided the best explanation for his geological observations.

It should come as no surprise, then, that he marveled over what he considered proof of Noah’s Flood when workmen in 1821 discovered a bone-filled cave near Kirkdale in Yorkshire. One of the first to explore the cavern, Buckland stumbled upon a bewildering variety of bones, including those of hyenas, tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotamuses. All these bones were embedded beneath stalactites in the red mud of the cave floor. It was a spectacular discovery indeed.

How did the bones of so many African species get mixed up together in a British cave? Seeing how some of the bones were gnawed, Buckland concluded hyenas had dragged them into their den long before the Flood, which he thought washed in the cave’s uppermost layer of red mud and more bones. The thin stalactites capping the mud confirmed a recent origin, consistent with Cuvier’s most recent geological catastrophe of five or six thousand years ago.

Inspired, Buckland gathered geological facts thought to demonstrate the reality of Noah’s Flood into his 1823
Relics of the Flood
. In it he described great accumulations of bones in “superficial and almost universal deposits of loam and gravel, which seems impossible to account for unless we ascribe them to a transient deluge, affecting universally, simultaneously, and at no very distant period, the entire surface of our planet.”
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The case for Noah’s Flood appeared to build once again, this time in the interpretation of surficial sediments.

Buckland combined his description of Kirkdale Cave with a synopsis of similar evidence for a recent deluge from other European caves. The continent’s surficial gravel contained exotic fossils like those from Kirkdale Cave and unlike modern species. Other evidence included giant blocks of granite from Mont Blanc scattered well beyond the Alps. Rejecting a southern origin for the Flood, he argued that Europe’s surficial gravel and stray boulders came from identifiable northerly sources. He also maintained that the violent floodwaters carved valleys far too deep and wide to have been cut by the piddling rivers that flowed through them today.

In coming to these conclusions, Buckland relied on what he saw with his own eyes. Nowhere did he invoke scriptural authority, even if it framed his view. His reasoning was compelling enough that others hailed his explanation as vindication for the reality of Noah’s Flood. Like Cuvier, he did nothing to discourage the idea. After all, his defense of a global flood had its rewards. Even before his work on Kirkdale Cave, Buckland received the Royal Society’s prestigious Copley Medal. Appointed Canon of Oxford’s Christchurch Cathedral three years later, he eventually became Dean of Westminster, one of the most prestigious positions in the Anglican Church.

Buckland was hardly alone in thinking he had found evidence of Noah’s Flood. Adam Sedgwick, who held Woodward’s old chair as professor of geology at Cambridge and taught Darwin his geology, summarized conventional thinking in 1825.

The sacred records tell us—that a few thousand years ago ‘the foundations of the great deep’ were broken up—and that the earth’s surface was submerged by the water of a general deluge… [which] has left traces of its operation in the diluvial detritus which is spread out over all the strata of the world.
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Not long afterward, cracks began developing in Buckland’s geological case for a global flood.

The end began when flood skeptics like John Fleming, an evangelical pastor in the Church of Scotland and professor of natural philosophy at Aberdeen, questioned the arguments and conclusions of flood champions like Cuvier and Buckland on theological as well as geological grounds. Fleming’s 1826 article in the
Edinburgh Philosophical Journal
used logic and literal interpretations of scripture to challenge Buckland’s version of the Flood.

Fleming opened with the problem of how Buckland could attribute extinctions to the Flood when the Bible said that two of every creature boarded the ark. If Noah saved a pair of all the world’s animals, then geologists could not blame extinctions on the Flood. And the biblical flood sounded like a relatively tranquil affair, leaving submerged olive trees intact after taking forty days and nights for the waters to rise. To Fleming, a literal interpretation of the biblical story was inconsistent with Buckland’s view of violent currents capable of carving deep valleys into hard rock and transporting huge boulders and carcasses halfway around the world. Fleming granted that a great flood could have swept away loose soil but doubted that so brief an event could have gouged out deep valleys. To the contrary, a literal reading of Genesis implied that the ark grounded out close to where Noah and his crew first embarked. Surely a flood powerful enough to reshape the world would strand Noah somewhere far from where he started.