The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (26 page)

More surprises awaited me down the next hall, where floor-to-ceiling panels asserted that scientists throughout history conspired to question, destroy, discredit, criticize, poison, and replace God’s Word. In this view, the dangerous brotherhood of science is humanity’s common enemy. Reason threatens us all.

After absorbing the anti-reason display, visitors advance to the modern world through a graffiti-filled alleyway, where mock windows voyeuristically display videos of a teenage boy watching pornography and a girl seeking an abortion. Across the alley a wrecking ball demolishing a church is branded with giant letters spelling out “millions of years.” The message is clear. Belief in geologic time drives the decay of modern society.

Moving through the next display, a Garden of Eden diorama where people and dinosaurs frolic together and signage says carnivores didn’t eat meat, I came to the creationist perspective on geology. The exhibit told how Noah’s crowded ark surfed a great wave that swept back and forth across the world. After the world-remodeling Flood, nothing much happened, except for a few volcanic eruptions and earthquakes scattered here and there throughout history. That rivers and glaciers could sculpt topography is summarily dismissed as the deranged product of human reason.

In this depiction, geologic time never happened. Gone are centuries of painstaking work to piece together the story of our planet. Gone are the overlapping tree-ring records that meticulously matched up patterns of annual growth to reach back more than ten thousand years. Gone are the hundreds of thousands of individual layers recording annual snowfall recovered from cores drilled through the polar ice caps. Gone are the revelations of plate tectonics that elegantly tied earth history together in a unifying framework, explaining the form of continents and their wanderings over millions of years. Gone, in fact, is nearly all of earth history.

In addition to the inherently untestable idea that a divine being created the universe with a particular plan in mind, creationists advocate testable interpretations of earth history. Because their ideas have failed when put to the test, they declare reason to be their enemy.

Even minimal geologic training equips one to see how the material displayed in some of these exhibits contradicts the interpretive signage. For example, dinosaur tracks preserved in layers of sedimentary rock present a serious problem for creationists. How could land animals have been walking around on the seafloor during an event that ripped up Earth’s surface before depositing their bones in the very stuff they were walking around on? Likewise, it is readily verifiable that it takes more vigorous flow to erode hard bedrock than to deposit loose sediment. How, then, could the peak of the Flood have laid down all the sedimentary rocks before the waning stages ripped open the Grand Canyon and carved out the world’s topography?

And why does this museum have so many displays showing giant reptiles hanging out with Adam and Eve when the Bible doesn’t even mention dinosaurs? Because if Noah’s Flood is pretty much all there was to earth history since the Creation, then dinosaurs must have lived alongside people in the days before the Flood. How did such beliefs gain traction?

We can trace the roots of modern creationism back to the nineteenth century, when geology emerged as a profession distinct from theology and natural philosophy. As geologists abandoned Noah’s Flood as a central subject and moved on to other pursuits, Christianity splintered into those willing to accept geological findings and those who insisted on the reality of a global flood. The later conflict over evolution served to strengthen such differences. As mainstream Protestants and Catholics adapted biblical interpretation to accommodate geology, a new breed of American fundamentalists defended the reality of a world-destroying flood as central to their faith.

The Bible was one of the only traditional sources of authority that emerged from the American Revolution unscathed (despite the best efforts of Thomas Paine). The war fostered independence in multiple forms and encouraged the revolutionary conviction that everyone (except women and slaves) possessed both common and moral sense. American Protestants began rejecting traditional forms of authority, confident their own vision would lead them closer to God. This commonsense populism paved the way for the fundamentalism that, in turn, spawned modern creationism.

In the early nineteenth century, camp meetings and revivals brought organized religion along as westward migration took people far from the established churches of the eastern seaboard. One of the first, Kentucky’s Cane Ridge Revival of 1801, was attended by thousands eager to hear populist preachers, gamble, and carouse—not necessarily in that order. The popularity of the weeklong meeting taught frontier preachers a winning strategy for spreading the Gospel across America.

In contrast to Presbyterian denominations that disciplined ministers who participated in boisterous revivals, Methodists and Baptists used the rowdy meetings to swell their ranks. Employing charismatic preachers with little or no education who could relate to the masses heading west, these sects grew into the largest Protestant congregations by the close of the frontier.

Populist preachers who considered the common sense of ordinary men more reliable than opinions espoused by seminary-trained theologians and book-learned professors encouraged people to cast off the chains of religious authority and interpret the Bible for themselves. The most successful preachers—those whose flocks grew the fastest—adopted popular language and manners. When coupled with belief in the Bible as the sole source of religious authority, populism encouraged settling theological disputes in the court of public opinion where everyone was entitled to interpret the Bible for him- or herself. This produced an interpretive free-for-all in which discredited ideas could compete with reasonable ones.

Sectarianism flourished in America’s religious marketplace. Splinter groups left mainstream denominations in disputes over doctrine, practice, and/or belief. Although the founders of these new denominations obviously disagreed on matters important to them, most shared the belief that the Bible was the only real authority for Christians and that its meaning was laid out plainly. Scripture meant exactly what it said, even if they didn’t agree on what it meant.

The advent of the American Civil War presented a theological crisis for American Christians. Both North and South used the Bible to either condemn or defend slavery. How could a plain-sense interpretation of scripture be infallible if one side had to be wrong? Such dilemmas only hardened divergent interpretations of the Bible.

Conservative Protestants began to forge a reactionary biblical literalism, based on biblical inerrancy. They believed that admitting even the slightest error in or sign of human influence on the sacred text would undermine the whole notion of Christian salvation. One need not look for deeper meanings because common sense tells us what the Bible means. Efforts to uphold literal, plain-sense scriptural interpretations began to distance evangelicals from mainstream thought.

Fundamentalism arose among conservative Protestants who viewed liberal accommodation of modern ideas and values as a betrayal of the core doctrines they viewed as fundamental to their faith. Foremost among these was biblical inerrancy. In 1895, the founding fathers of fundamentalism declared this doctrine one of the “five points of fundamentalism” at the Niagara Bible Conference where they staked out their unnegotiable beliefs. Two decades later, the conservative Protestant academics who authored
The Fundamentals
, a series of essays published between 1910 and 1915 that gave birth to fundamentalism, attacked critical historical and literary analysis that questioned biblical authority.

At first fundamentalists did not insist on strict biblical literalism. The Bible could not be wrong, but interpretations could adapt as needed to preserve biblical infallibility. The Bible could be read in different ways. The original fundamentalists juggled what to read figuratively and what to read literally in order to preserve biblical infallibility. Their approach was surprisingly flexible in comparison to their counterparts today. Most accepted an old Earth through either the day-age theory or the gap theory and were open to the idea that Noah’s Flood may have been a local affair that wiped out humanity’s roots.

By the 1920s, a loose coalition of militant Protestants began to characterize liberals as false Christians who had lost faith in traditional beliefs and doctrines. Claiming to defend the true faith, newly militant fundamentalists combined biblical inerrancy with biblical literalism. Their zeal to combat biblical criticism lay in the conviction that admitting the Bible had a history colored by human fallibility opened the door to doubting redemption through Christ. A literal reading founded on biblical inerrancy formed the levee fundamentalists built to save the Bible from the flood of modernism.

Fundamentalists became increasingly isolated as their efforts to stem the rising tide of liberal thought failed to sway mainstream denominations in the 1930s. They then focused on building their own network of churches and schools dedicated to teaching biblical infallibility. As fundamentalists began slipping into a self-contained world, the recycled arguments of flood geology seemed to provide fresh ammunition for the fight to ban teaching evolution in public schools—and its heretical foundation in an ancient Earth.

By the mid-twentieth century, conservatives militantly pushing literal biblical interpretation stopped interacting with geologists just as breakthroughs like the ability to use radioactive decay to directly date the age of rocks and fossils began to revolutionize the earth sciences. Paleontologists, in particular, threw cold water on the creationist idea that mammoths were flash-frozen or buried in a sudden environmental calamity.

In 1929, Carnegie Museum curator of paleontology Innokenty Tolmachoff meticulously described the circumstances and condition of every known mammoth carcass discovery dating back to the seventeenth century. Three dozen sites pretty much accounted for them all. Noting evidence that mammoths ate great volumes of tundra grass in the summer, Tolmachoff lambasted claims that mammoths roamed a more temperate Siberia. Mammoths were creatures of the ice age, not victims of it. They only went extinct at the end of the last glaciation.

Tolmachoff also reported that stories of mammoth carcasses preserved well enough to eat were greatly exaggerated. Dogs greedily devoured thawed mammoth, but people found it inedible. As far as he could tell, there was no basis for tales of great feasts prepared from their frozen carcasses. Firsthand accounts consistently reported putrid flesh in advanced states of decay. And the circumstances surrounding their discovery suggested that mammoths became stuck in soft mud, were caught in collapsed thawing ground, or drowned along big rivers. They died mundane, solitary deaths.

Such evidence did not dissuade the followers of George McCready Price, a prolific, self-taught writer of geology books, despite having no geological education or training. The writings of Ellen Gould White, founding prophetess of Seventh-day Adventism, convinced Price of the validity of flood geology. He rejected the popular day-age and gap theories based on White’s accounts of visions she’d had in which she saw God create the world in six twenty-four-hour days and rest on the seventh. Her trancelike visions revealed that fossils were buried when Noah’s Flood reworked Earth’s surface. Explaining how God removed all the rotting carcasses after the Flood, she told of how a great wind carried “away the tops of mountains like mighty avalanches, forming huge hills and high mountains where there were none to be seen before, and burying the dead bodies with trees, stones, and earth.”
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All that buried vegetation turned into coal, which God occasionally ignited when He wanted to fire up volcanoes. White’s fantasylike explanations sound like the wild ideas of seventeenth-century natural philosophers.

Born in rural New Brunswick in 1870, Price was a child when his father died and his mother joined the apocalyptically inclined Adventists. Fresh out of high school, he married an older Adventist woman, and together they made their living selling White’s Adventist books door-to-door across Canada. A few years later, in 1891, Price enrolled in Battle Creek College, an Adventist school in Michigan, but fell back to selling books two years later when his money ran out.

Around the turn of the century, when serving as a high school principal in eastern Canada, Price nearly succumbed to the local physician’s views on evolution after borrowing volumes from his friend’s library. Price concluded that a solid geological foundation would make evolution appear to be reasonable. He came close to accepting that there really must be something to the idea of vast geological ages and worlds lost to the depths of time. But how could he reconcile geologic time with White’s teachings? Guided by prayer, he decided that geologists were fooling themselves. Fossils were really all the same age. Shocked by how he almost yielded to temptation, Price vowed to promote White’s vision of how Noah’s Flood accounted for the fossil record. He had at last found his calling.

Several years later Price had ample time to ponder how to refute geological theories while working as a handyman at an Adventist sanitarium in southern California. In 1906, his self-published and aptly named
Illogical Geology
attacked the geological foundations of evolution and claimed there was no proof that any fossil was older than any other. The succession of organisms that geologists found in the rocks was really a mixed-up sampling of communities that lived in different parts of the world before the Flood. What really happened was that a sudden shifting of Earth’s axis had released great subterranean reservoirs and drowned the world. Then a miraculous cosmic storm buried all the drowned bodies and kept the atmosphere from going putrid. Afterwards, the receding waters carved natural wonders like Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon. His geological story reheated Burnet’s and Woodward’s stale theories.