The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (27 page)

Price sent copies of his book to eminent geologists seeking their reaction. Among the few who bothered to respond was David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University and an expert on fossil fishes. In a letter to Price, Jordan warned him not to expect geologists to take him seriously because his argument was based on “mistakes, omissions and exceptions” that rendered his case “as convincing [as] if one should take the facts of European history and attempt to show that all the various events were simultaneous.”
²
Equally impressed by Price’s obvious intelligence and ignorance of geology, Jordan tried for over two decades to convince him to get some experience in field or laboratory work. Decades later, students on a fossil-hunting trip were astonished to discover that the world’s leading creationist could hardly tell one fossil from another.

The roots of modern creationism run directly back to Price. Honing arguments faithful to White’s teaching, Price convinced himself that it was the theories of geologists and not the rocks themselves that opposed a literal reading of Genesis. He called his view of geology the new catastrophism to distinguish it from earlier views of earth history involving multiple catastrophes.

Initially, Price made little headway among fundamentalists and he was careful not to point out the incompatibility of his views with the widely accepted day-age and gap theories. Most fundamentalists committed to scriptural inerrancy followed the conservative
Schofield Reference Bible
, which endorsed the gap theory in explaining that the original Creation in the first verse of Genesis “refers to the dateless past, and gives scope for all the geological ages.”
³
Price was a lonely voice insisting on the literal truth of a global flood that rearranged Earth’s surface and deposited the whole fossil record along with all the world’s sedimentary rocks.

Geologists ridiculed his ideas mercilessly. Professors routinely assigned graduate students the exercise of refuting them. Writing in
Science
in 1922, Arthur Miller, the head of the geology department at the University of Kentucky, described Price as an “alleged geologist… who, while a member of no scientific body and absolutely unknown in scientific circles… is hailed by the ‘Fundamentalists’ as their great champion—one who… has brought into prominence the ‘heretofore mute evidence of a mighty upheaval and a flood.’ ”
⁴
Miller was amazed that Price had the audacity to accuse geologists of being biased when Price’s new catastrophism “turns out to be nothing more than the Old Catastrophism embodied in the Noachian Deluge.”
⁵

When Price read Miller’s disparaging remarks, he fired off an angry letter threatening to sue if not given the chance for a rebuttal. The editor offered to correct any errors of fact but declined to publish Price’s geological views. In response, Price unleashed a furious retort in the
Sunday School Times
.

Convinced that a great flood remodeled the entire world, Price called on vast mammoth graveyards as evidence of a sudden calamity, unaware that none had actually been found. He repeated the apocryphal stories of frozen mammoth proving fresh enough for a feast, apparently unaware that firsthand reports contradicted this popular misconception. He also argued that coal deposits and fossil coral found at high latitudes indicated a warmer pre-flood world. He considered this last point particularly persuasive because geologists could not yet explain the fossilized remains of tropical organisms found near the poles.

Price published
The New Geology
in 1923, covering standard introductory subjects. Written to look like a textbook, although aimed at the general reader, Price’s book attacked conventional notions of geology. The uninformed reader would see nothing in it to indicate that this did not lay out the essentials of modern geology. Until, that is, one discovered Price’s assertion that geological understanding of a progressive succession of organisms through geologic time was not only flawed, but had been “disproved by a large number of recently discovered facts” that he neglected to mention.
⁶
Instead, he simply asserted that all the animals in the entire fossil record—trilobites, ammonites, dinosaurs, and mammoths—lived together in harmony with people before the Flood.

Whether ignorant or simply dismissive of centuries of discovery and debate, Price attributed the entire geologic record to Noah’s Flood depositing enormous piles of sediment chock full of fossils. Settling disrupted the pile where the basement strata were unable to support the extra load. Arguing that the folding and tilting of rocks occurred while they were still soft, Price accused mainstream geologists of raw prejudice as he himself never bothered to learn any geology and ignored evidence accumulated by generations of geologists.

Isolated from contact with geological thinking, fundamentalists looking for arguments to use in their attacks on evolution in the 1920s turned to Price’s flood geology, trusting that it was based on sound science. With no trained geologists among hard-core evangelicals, Price was virtually unchallenged as the sole geological voice in fundamentalist ranks. Offering a message right on target for the war on evolution, Price became a fundamentalist darling. By the mid-1920s he was a regular contributor to conservative religious periodicals. In short order, although he had no scientific background or training, he became the fundamentalists’ principal scientific authority.

Fundamentalist beliefs on evolution came to a head in the spring of 1925, when high school teacher John Thomas Scopes confessed to violating a state law against teaching human evolution in Dayton, Tennessee. At his famous trial, defense attorney Clarence Darrow called prosecutor William Jennings Bryan to the witness stand as his final expert on the relation between science and the Bible. Bryan was a well-known politician who jumped at an opportunity to campaign against the moral decay that set in when evolution encouraged people to question biblical authority.

Darrow grilled Bryan about a host of biblical absurdities. Where did Cain, the murderous son of Adam and Eve, find his wife if his parents were the only other people on Earth? Was Jonah really eaten by a whale and then spit up alive after spending days submerged in the belly of the beast? How could Bishop Ussher’s 4004
BC
date for the creation be accurate when Chinese and Egyptian history extend back farther in time? Could Bryan point to any credible scientist who believed that the story of a global flood could be taken literally? In response, Bryan named Price.

Hearing this, Darrow scoffed, “You mentioned Price because he is the only human being in the world so far as you know that signs his name as a geologist that believes like you do… every scientist in this country knows [he] is… a pretender and not a geologist at all.
⁷
” Darrow went on to get Bryan to admit that the days of Genesis 1 were not literal twenty-four-hour days. Each day might have lasted for millions of years. The planet itself might be quite ancient even if people were created just six thousand years ago. Although Bryan reportedly believed in a local rather than a global flood and equated young-Earth creationists with flat Earthers, it did not stop him from using Price’s flood geology to attack evolution.

At the end of the day, despite Bryan’s joking rejoinders, Darrow had made his point that literalists interpreted the Bible as much as anyone, cherry-picking their way through Scripture. The other defense attorney, Dudley Field Malone, noted that Bryan’s reading was not the only way for Christians to interpret the Bible: it was possible to accept modern science as not being at odds with religious truths.

The press was not at all kind to Bryan. Neither was fate. He died right after the trial.

Creationists changed tactics and turned on librarians and teachers, harassing them to keep textbooks that fundamentalists considered objectionable out of classrooms. Creationists who had made front-page headlines in the 1920s were all but forgotten a decade later. Shut out of the popular press, they turned to building their own institutional base, starting their own organizations, journals, and schools. Fundamentalists of this era varied greatly in terms of what to believe about geological ages and the biblical flood. Some, like Price, held to the strict literal interpretation of six days of creation followed by a global flood. Others promoted the gap theory or the idea that each day in the week of creation represented a whole geological age. Leading fundamentalists began to wonder how evangelical Christians could convert the world to their views if they didn’t even agree among themselves.

Of course, when Price first claimed that all the organisms preserved as fossils died in a sudden catastrophe, there was no way to date their deaths and directly test his claim. Steno’s approach could reveal the relative age of the geological formations containing fossils by determining their order of deposition, but there wasn’t yet any way to directly measure the age of fossil-bearing rocks or fossils themselves.

Graph showing first test of radiocarbon dating in a plot of known sample age versus the rate of carbon-14 (
¹⁴
C) decay and the close fit between measured values (data points) and values predicted (curve) by radiocarbon decay
(
based on a figure in Arnold, J. R., and Libby, W. F., 1949, Age determinations by radiocarbon content: Checks with samples of known age,
Science
, v. 110, p. 678-680
).

The development of radiocarbon dating was revolutionary, as it enabled scientists to reliably date deposits from the last few tens of thousands of years. The method was developed by Willard Libby at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Nuclear Studies and is based on measuring the rate of decay of the naturally occurring unstable radioactive isotope
¹⁴
C (carbon-14). Collisions between cosmic ray protons and particles in the atmosphere produce secondary neutrons that are captured by nitrogen nuclei in the N
₂
gas that forms most of the atmosphere. This fusion creates
¹⁴
C, which decays to the normal stable nitrogen isotope (
¹⁴
N) with a characteristic half-life of about 5,720 years, the time it takes for half of the amount remaining to decay. When plants convert atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO
₂
) into organic matter during photosynthesis, a small amount of
¹⁴
C is incorporated in proportion to the amount in the atmosphere. The atmospheric ratio of
¹⁴
C to
¹²
C is maintained in living things that continually incorporate new carbon into their bodies. But after they die, the
¹⁴
C no longer gets refreshed and starts to decay exponentially—at a rate proportional to the amount left. Libby reasoned that if one knew the half-life of
¹⁴
C, one could tell how long decay had been going on by measuring the present rate of decay.

He tested the technique by dating wood from samples with a range of independently known ages. The youngest came from a piece of Douglas fir cut down in 623
AD.
Others included the sarcophagus of an Egyptian mummy dating from the third century
BC
, the inner rings of an almost three-thousand-year-old redwood tree, deck boards from the funerary barge of an Egyptian pharaoh who died around 1843
BC
, and wood from a pair of five-thousand-year-old tombs. The ages predicted by radiocarbon dating closely agreed with the known ages of the samples. Radiocarbon dating worked.

Its application to woolly mammoth carcasses presented a serious problem for champions of flood geology. Carbon dating showed that mammoth carcasses range from more than forty thousand to less than ten thousand years old, disproving the single catastrophe theory. Mammoths did not all die at once.

How did evangelicals respond to these findings? Many accepted radiometric dating, the idea of an old Earth, and the possibility of a regional flood. But those fundamentalists committed to flood geology and a young Earth responded not with facts or a reinterpretation of scripture; they simply refused to believe it.

This didn’t solve their mammoth problem. Studies of individual mammoth carcasses revealed that mammoths did not all drown, as they surely would have in a global flood. Some died in the old-elephant death position, down on the stomach with legs stretched out in front. Others sank through the permafrost, fell into collapse pits, or got stuck in swampy ground, unable to extract their bulk from the mire. Mosses, grasses, and herbs found in mammoth stomachs were characteristic of the vegetation growing within a few hundred kilometers of their carcasses. There was no need to invoke a global flood to deliver them from the tropics. Mammoths lived and died close to where their remains were found.