The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (7 page)

Remarkable for the clarity of his thoughts about the relationship between rational and spiritual life, Augustine warned of the danger in embracing biblical interpretations that conflicted with reason. Fearing that Christians could lose faith when confronted by evidence contradicting sanctioned interpretations of scripture, Augustine wrote:

Let no one think that, because the Psalmist says, He established the earth above the water, we must use this testimony of Holy Scripture against these people who engage in learned discussions… . Ignorant of the sense of these words, they will more readily scorn our sacred books than disavow the knowledge they have acquired by unassailable arguments or proved by the evidence of experience.
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Secure in his faith that Scripture and the natural world shared a common author, Augustine advocated flexible biblical interpretation that could be adjusted in light of what one learned about the natural world. He advised Christians to avoid endorsing biblical interpretations contradicted by what they could see for themselves.

Augustine also defended the idea that Noah’s Flood covered the whole planet by employing explanations based on the knowledge of his day. When critics argued that floodwaters could not have risen higher than the lighter clouds surrounding Mount Olympus, Augustine countered that Olympus itself towered over the clouds despite being made of earth, the heaviest element. Why, therefore, could not water rise as high for a brief time? While this argument seems rather silly today, it sounded rational at the time and shows Augustine’s flexible thinking in reasoning about the nature of the world. To him, one could make sense of natural and physical phenomena so long as one had a keen eye and a curious mind.

To Augustine, the most compelling evidence for a global flood was the widespread occurrence of plant and animal remains in rocks. Fossils seemed to tell the story as plainly as the Bible. Far more interesting and controversial were questions about the symbolic meanings and significance of Noah’s story.

Augustine’s contemporary, Saint Jerome, translated the Bible into Latin and institutionalized allegorical interpretations. Jerome also extolled the virtues of thoughtful reasoning in understanding scripture. Holding Earth’s disrupted, broken, and twisted crust as evidence of God’s wrath, he considered literal interpretation of the Bible as shallow reasoning. Jerome cemented within the church a tradition of considering literal interpretations for the illiterate masses and allegory for more advanced minds—that is, the clergy. For a thousand years it was the clergy’s job to offer deeper and more meaningful interpretations for those lacking the interest, commitment, or intellect to take on the task. Eventually, the tide shifted when Martin Luther led the sixteenth-century Protestant rebellion against an elite, allegorically minded priesthood, reclaiming the banner of biblical interpretation for the more literal-minded.

Jerome’s translation of Genesis introduced unintended fodder for conflicting interpretations when he chose to translate the Hebrew word “adamah” to Latin as
terra
, “earth,” instead of
humus
, “soil.” His choice of earth instead of soil for this passage (Genesis 3:17) in the Latin Bible sparked debate about whether God cursed the whole planet or just the fields tilled by man. If earth meant soil, then Adam’s punishment consisted of having to work the land for a living. But if God cursed Earth itself, then perhaps topography was a manifestation of divine vengeance, the lasting signature of a world-shattering catastrophe. This (mis)translation would greatly influence fellow Christians who believed in the ongoing degeneration of both humanity and the world following Adam and Eve’s fall from grace.

Both Jewish and early Christian traditions held that mountains formed after God created the world, which initially was a more perfect form, like a sphere or an egg. Some held that God scooped out the ocean basins and piled up the spoils to form continents and mountains a couple of days before he created people. Others thought that topography arose from sin but argued over the timing. Perhaps God inflicted the inconvenience of mountains to punish Adam and Eve when they were expelled from the Garden of Eden. Or maybe mountains formed when He cursed Earth for receiving Abel’s blood. Many of those who pondered such things believed that topography formed when Noah’s Flood reworked Earth’s surface. Whether formed before or during the Flood, the irregular form of mountains testified to how God could extend his punishment of humanity to scarring the face of a once perfect Paradise.

In this vein, early Christians generally considered fossil seashells relics of Noah’s Flood, tangible reminders of humanity’s depravity. Through the Middle Ages Christian theologians taught that the ongoing decay of the world mirrored mankind’s spiritual and moral degeneration. Where today we see high mountains and dramatic landforms as iconic natural cathedrals embodying the wonder of creation, for centuries the Christian perspective was just the opposite.

Augustine’s views endured in those of thirteenth-century Catholic philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas. Like Augustine, he advocated flexibility in interpreting Genesis. He thought that because the church was eternal, Christianity could wait until natural philosophers determined what was certain before deciding which of the possible interpretations of Genesis to abandon in the face of apparent contradictions. Although Aquinas accepted the reality of Noah’s Flood, he promoted understanding the book of nature—God’s other book—in seeking to understand both scripture and the world around us. God created reason and endowed humanity with the ability to judge truth and the free will to embrace or deny it. Aquinas allowed no room for conflict between the Creator and how the world worked. He considered such conflict a logical absurdity.

Aquinas and Augustine viewed reason as a fruitful gift and a way for people to embrace and practice learning about things larger and more meaningful than one’s self. To me, this sounds perfectly consistent with how geologists like myself, and scientists in disciplines from astronomy to zoology, conduct our inquiries. I didn’t expect to find the bedrock principle underlying science enshrined in early Christian thought.

Still, times have changed. In Aquinas’s day, three generally accepted facts about earth history were rooted in the teachings of the church. The world was a few thousand years old, Noah’s Flood reshaped topography, and everything would end in a great conflagration at the end of the millennium (although, as we’ll see, opinions differed as to just when that would be).

Later in the Renaissance, the rediscovery and translation of influential Greek and Arabic philosophical texts blurred the distinction between living and nonliving things. If Earth itself was alive, perhaps fossils, a name that covered any odd thing found in a rock, could grow in rocks. Stalactites dripping from the ceiling of caves grew within the earth. Why not fossils too? Such thinking led natural philosophers to see fossils as objects that simply mimicked the shapes of living organisms. While natural philosophers came to regard fossils as nothing more than mineral curiosities, a few, like Leonardo da Vinci, thought otherwise.

Late in the fifteenth century, the rivers and hills of northern Italy fascinated the son of a public official in the town of Vinci, nestled at the foot of Monte Albano. As a boy Leonardo wandered up the mountain and found a cave where the rock walls were a hash of seashells and fish bones. A natural skeptic, he didn’t believe the common explanation that Noah’s Flood had carried the shells into the mountains. His doubts were strengthened when, years later, he worked on canal projects where excavations exposed numerous fossils embedded in solid rock. Observing his surroundings, Leonardo concluded that a great flood did not entomb marine life in stone. Some shells were clamped shut, as if buried alive. Others were broken into fragments and scattered in deposits resembling modern beaches. The surfaces of rock layers even preserved worm tracks. He may have been the first to question whether worms could crawl around the seafloor and leave perfectly shaped, undisturbed tracks during an epic flood.

Watching how flowing water moves sediment, Leonardo concluded that no flood could have carried ancient seashells into the mountains for the simple reason that fossils and other objects heavier than water sank to the bottom of a current. Fossils were neither souvenirs of the Flood nor inanimate curiosities. Either God was trying to trick him, or the story was more complicated than implied by a simple reading of Genesis.

Leonardo reasoned that layers of sedimentary rock initially formed from mud that gradually settled to the bottom of an ancient sea. Fossil shells preserved in the rocks high on ridges were deposited during an era of higher sea level. Trusting reason and the testimony of his own eyes to decipher the structure of God’s grand design, he saw no evidence of a catastrophic deluge.

Even if Noah’s Flood had drowned the world, Leonardo did not see how it could have carved topography. If it rained enough to submerge the highest peaks, the floodwaters would have formed a great sphere. But were water to everywhere rise to the same elevation, it would have no slope to propel it. How could the floodwaters erode valleys without moving? Besides, where did all that water go afterward? For a mind such as Leonardo’s, more looking and thinking only spawned more questions.

Getting rid of the floodwaters presented as great a challenge as generating a global flood. Evaporating a globe-covering mass of water would require more heat than the Sun could muster. And not only were shells heavy enough to settle out in turbulent water, but the water at the bottom of a wave moves away from shore. Noah’s Flood would have dragged fossils out to sea rather than pushed them up onto mountains. To Leonardo, fossil shells entombed in upland rocks, the conventional evidence for a global flood, amounted to no evidence at all.

Later, exploration of the New World would raise new problems for a global flood. Particularly troublesome was the huge increase in the number of species Noah had to house on his ark as explorers discovered the world’s great variety of life-forms. As confounding as how all of these new animals could have fit aboard was the question of how they traveled to the ark before the flood and then back home again afterward, all without leaving any offspring in the Old World.

Unlike Leonardo, who stuck close to home, everywhere European explorers went they found people who didn’t appear to be descended from a Jewish patriarch. Biblical apologists proposed that Native Americans descended from the lost tribes of Israel, from Viking expeditions, or from people who had crossed ancient land bridges to the New World. Such solutions introduced even more problems. Where were these continent-connecting land bridges now? Could Pygmies, Vikings, and Aborigines all have descended from Noah in just a few thousand years, when classical statues revealed that Greeks and Italians looked the same two thousand years ago as they do today? If people changed so slowly, how could the kaleidoscope of the world’s ethnicities have developed since Noah’s Flood? However one looked at it, the biblical account provided an incomplete view of earth history.

The discussion changed with the arrival of Protestant thought. The reformers who split the church broke with the centuries-long Catholic tradition of allegorical interpretation but could not agree among themselves about how to read the story of Noah’s Flood. Protestants introduced both more literal and liberal interpretations as they taught all people to interpret the Bible for themselves.

Unlike their contemporaries in the sixteenth-century Catholic church, Martin Luther and John Calvin ignored the implications of New World discoveries. They were religious reformers, not explorers faced with conundrums manifest in the flesh of exotic animals and peoples. But here again we find more debate than uniformity of thought. The two great minds that laid the intellectual foundation of the Protestant church, and all its denominational offspring, offered opposing interpretations of Noah’s Flood. In their commentaries we can recognize a resemblance to scientific rivals hashing out how to interpret puzzling data.

Published in 1545, Luther’s
Lectures on Genesis
devoted more than a hundred pages to commentary on Noah’s Flood. He declared that Moses “spoke properly and plainly, and neither allegorically nor figuratively.”
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He held that the Flood annihilated the earthly paradise and left no trace of Earth’s original surface in its wake. Petrified wood and fossils dug out of mines, the buried ruins of the former world, were all that was left to testify to the destruction of humanity’s cradle. Generating the Flood was no problem because God held the continents above the seas through divine buoyancy He could rescind on command.

And then, like the coat of a dog shaking off after a bath, the surface of the world went from flat to wrinkled. A quick dunk and shake sums up how Luther’s Flood reshaped the world to create modern topography. Some areas rose to become mountains. Others sank beneath the seas. The Flood destroyed Earth’s original soil that had produced incredible bounty with little labor. “Before the Flood turnips were better than melons, oranges, or pomegranates were afterwards.”
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Luther even asserted that the Flood began in springtime to maximize the terror for a populace “full of the expectation of a new year.”
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Clearly, such opinions expand upon a literal interpretation of Genesis, if only because, like dinosaurs, turnips are not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. Given his propensity to supply details of his own, even Luther, someone generally considered a strict biblical literalist, struggled with biblical interpretation.

Having grown up in the tamed, rolling hills of lowland Germany, Luther was unaccustomed to and intimidated by alpine topography. To his eye, the ragged nature of mountains mirrored mankind’s spiritual deterioration. Mankind had been in decline since the chaos of the Flood resurfaced the world and left mountains tarnishing the face of creation.