The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (32 page)

Raised Southern Baptist, Morris drifted into religious indifference in his undergraduate years. After a period of intense soul-searching following graduation, he rejected evolution and embraced a literal six-day creation. Not letting this interfere with pursuing his worldly interests, he went on to earn a PhD in hydraulic engineering from the University of Minnesota. A successful academic, he eventually headed the civil engineering program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

This unique pair, an Old Testament theologian and a hydraulic engineer, met in the summer of 1953 at the annual American Scientific Affiliation convention. Whitcomb attended Morris’s presentation on “The Biblical Evidence for a Recent Creation and Universal Deluge.” He was as impressed with the talk as he was appalled by its polite dismissal by an audience familiar with J. Laurence Kulp’s devastating critiques of flood geology. Whitcomb had found an ally.

Further incensed by the favorable reception of Bernard Ramm’s book in the evangelical community, Whitcomb decided to write his thesis on the biblical case for a global flood. He completed his dissertation in 1957 and immediately began looking for a publisher. Two established evangelical publishers, Eerdmans and Moody, expressed interest. After seeing the manuscript Eerdmans declined to publish it. Moody agreed to take it, but encouraged Whitcomb to have the chapters dealing with scientific aspects of the Flood either checked or coauthored by a PhD scientist, preferably a geologist. Whitcomb reluctantly agreed.

The only geologist he could find willing to look at the manuscript was appalled by what he read. He wrote to Whitcomb that if there were any truth to such a globe-wrecking flood, some well-trained geologist would have put the story together. The reviewer suggested that Whitcomb learn the basics of historical geology.

Instead, Whitcomb decided to limit himself to advice from fellow creationists. Of those he approached, Morris turned out to be the most helpful and enthused. Impressed by the first three chapters of Whitcomb’s dissertation, Morris admitted that he, too, had been working on a flood geology book. He advised Whitcomb to refrain from sarcasm and ridicule and suggested he emphasize theological arguments. In this way, Whitcomb could avoid getting trapped by geological ones.

Grateful for input from someone more familiar with the technical objections to flood geology, Whitcomb asked Morris to coauthor his book. Morris enthusiastically signed on. Four years later, Moody turned down their finished manuscript, but a small publisher eager to challenge the geological foundation for evolution published
The Genesis Flood
in 1961.

The book began with a long argument for the reality of a global flood that killed off everyone and everything not aboard the ark. Whitcomb and Morris acknowledged more of the recent archaeological and geological evidence than had George McCready Price, but they were just as selective and prejudicial in evaluating that evidence. They were forthright in admitting as much: “We take this revealed framework of history as our basic datum, and then try to see how all the pertinent data can be understood in this context… . It is not a scientific decision at all, but a spiritual one.”
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In their view, Christians faced a stark choice: “Either the Biblical record of the Flood is false and must be rejected or else the system of historical geology which has seemed to discredit it is wrong and must be changed.”
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Confident God’s Word could not lead them astray, Whitcomb and Morris were clear about how to reconcile science and the Bible. Rejecting the idea of reinterpreting scripture to accommodate science, they advocated “letting the Bible speak for itself and then trying to understand the geological data in the light of its teachings.”
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In other words, they tried to figure out geologic history by reading the Bible and then looked for data supporting the proper conclusion—and dismissed or ignored contrary evidence.

In setting up their argument, Whitcomb and Morris first asserted biblical inerrancy and rejected both a tranquil and a local flood as inconsistent with the plain meaning of the biblical story. Any fool could see the Flood was violent and global.

Whitcomb and Morris offered a number of geological inferences from the biblical account. They were certain that a tremendous quantity of water poured down on the earth in a torrential downpour that continued for forty days and nights all around the world. Yet they also accepted that the clouds held nowhere near enough water to trigger a global flood. The floodwaters had to come from somewhere else. Pockets of water trapped underground since the Creation must have erupted to the surface. Still, this wasn’t enough. They looked to the heavens for more.

They found enough water for Noah’s Flood in the cryptic biblical reference to the waters above the firmament (Genesis 1:7), arguing that God enclosed the primordial world in a gigantic canopy of water vapor (the same argument astronomer Edmund Halley used in the seventeenth century). At a loss to explain rationally how to bring their vapor canopy down to earth, they invoked another miracle to collapse this curtain of water. God hung it above the sky, so He could drop it when he pleased.

Shielding the planet from the harmful effects of radiation, this vaporous cocoon allowed Adam and the antediluvian patriarchs to live incredibly long lives. The greenhouse effect it produced warmed the planet into a tropical state, explaining why fossils the world over seemed to have lived in warmer times.

However God did it, the water from the canopy spilled out over forty days and nights, draining into collapsed lowlands that became the world’s oceans. Tectonic movements raised continents as the chaotic flood buried fossils in sediments that then solidified to become rocks. Then for months afterwards the world convulsed with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, followed by a brief ice age. Whitcomb and Morris went on to claim that the rock record supported all of these inferences. Their evidence: “Almost all of the sedimentary rocks of the earth, which are the ones containing fossils and from which the supposed geologic history of the earth has been largely deduced, have been laid down by moving waters.”
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Their technical argument for a global flood was that sedimentary rocks exist and are deposited by flowing water. From this foundation they leapt to the conclusion that a global flood, Noah’s Flood, did in fact occur.

In attacking conventional views, they quoted a geological textbook out of context to argue that geologists use fossils to determine the relative age of rocks, overlooking how stratigraphic order was established unambiguously in places like Siccar Point and the Grand Canyon. Aware that geologists viewed Price as a crackpot, Whitcomb and Morris nonetheless adopted his idea that the order to the fossil record actually recorded different environments in different parts of the pre-Flood world. They offered three ways to explain why the oldest rocks contain only single-celled creatures and why younger rocks contain progressively more diverse and complex organisms. Their first suggestion was Woodward’s long-discredited idea about sediment and fossils settling out by density. Their second was that marine fauna would have perished first and therefore be interred in deeper strata. Lastly, certain animals, whether by anatomical design or ingenuity, struggled longer to resist the Flood, their bodies settling later into higher layers of flood-deposited sediment.

Anyone in an introductory geology course could readily address how these ideas are incapable of explaining the fossil record. Most damning is the remarkable order to fossil sequences. Trilobites only occur in the lowest strata, which do not contain the densest fossils and often host delicate floating creatures. Were hydraulic sorting to explain the order to the fossil record, small trilobites would always be found above larger trilobites because objects of the same density sort by size when settling through a fluid. This is not what one finds in the rocks. Lowland sloths that could not have fled into the mountains on short notice are only found in the uppermost, youngest strata. Dinosaurs and people are not found in the same rocks.

Unlike those who originally offered such ideas centuries earlier, Whitcomb and Morris made no attempt to test them against the geologic record. Instead, they questioned standard geologic evidence and, like their predecessors, invented scenarios and miracles as needed to explain inconvenient aspects of the biblical narrative. To solve the problem of getting animals to and from the ark, they argued that those making it onto the ark lived close by. After all, world geography must have been quite different before the Flood. They simply invoked supernatural assistance to cover the care and feeding of all the animals.

Whitcomb and Morris admit that the biblical flood could not have occurred before 10,000
BC
, the date by when archaeological consensus then held that people had made it to North America. So they rejected carbon dating in order to conclude the archaeological dates must be wrong. In particular, they criticized the assumptions of a constant
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C concentration in the atmosphere, a constant cosmic ray flux, and a constant radioactive decay rate to argue that carbon dating only worked for the time after the Flood. They explained that Earth’s original vapor canopy served as a cosmic radiation shield, inhibiting the formation of
¹⁴
C in the atmosphere until after Noah disembarked. They then invoked greater rates of radioactive decay before the Flood to make geologic data fit a young Earth. They ignored how this would have generated tremendous heat, making paradise hellish in the days before their vapor canopy collapsed.

There is some validity to their claim that carbon dating is affected by variations in the history of Earth’s atmosphere and cosmic ray activity. Cosmic ray activity does indeed vary through time—just not enough to matter all that much. Whitcomb and Morris’s claim about its crippling effect on carbon dating was debunked in the 1980s, when Minze Stuiver and colleagues at the University of Washington worked out a calibration curve that extended back 13,300 years by simply counting tree rings in cross sections of logs cut at a known date and then carbon dating material from individual rings that could be lined up like overlapping bar codes from the ring patterns of different trees.

Whitcomb and Morris did not stop there, however. They argued that plants, animals, soils, and rocks were all created with the appearance of age. God made rocks with isotopic compositions identical to what one would expect had they really been ancient. In their view, the real flaw with radiometric dating was that God had put just the right amounts of different radioactive isotopes into rocks and the fossils they contained to make them seem really old.

This was not the first time that the doctrine of apparent age—the idea that God made the world to look old—was invoked to explain away geological evidence. Such thinking was popular among nineteenth-century defenders of a global flood who argued that God preloaded fossils into rocks and made them look like they had been deposited naturally. This idea that had been laughed out of Victorian England took root in cold war America.

Whitcomb and Morris even recycled Cotton Mather’s arguments about antediluvian giants. Claiming that human and dinosaur footprints found along the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas, were so close together that they overlapped, they included a photograph purporting to show human footprints alongside those of dinosaurs. Pointing out the tremendous size of the footprints they reminded the reader of the biblical statements about giants in the days before the Flood. However, years later, after seeing the famous tracks for himself, Morris acknowledged they were just dinosaur footprints after all.
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By using the Flood to explain the entire sedimentary record, Whitcomb and Morris proposed a version of geologic history that seventeenth-century cosmologists would have recognized as one of their own. Ignoring all the data that convinced eighteenth- and nineteenth-century flood supporters to give up on the idea of a global flood, Whitcomb and Morris focused on that which geologists could not explain. They thought that a great flood provided as good an explanation as geological theories if one abandoned the idea that different fossil assemblages recorded life at different times.

Whitcomb and Morris actually had some legitimate concerns and pointed out problems with the traditional views of earth scientists. What, for example, did kill off the dinosaurs? Serious objections existed to most theories of dinosaur extinction. Here was a mystery with the last chapter torn out.

Another mystery lay in the great stacks of marine sedimentary rock now stranded on continents high above the sea. How did they get there? Whitcomb and Morris noted that geologists had no explanation for this phenomenon. The only modern force with any real potential to raise up mountains was an earthquake, but the uplift observed during historical earthquakes would not add up to much change over the brief time they claimed the Bible allowed for all of earth history. As far as they were concerned, the processes that raised mountains and folded rocks were no longer operating.

Seizing on what they saw as fatal failures of conventional geology, Whitcomb and Morris revived the discredited idea of a global flood. Their case, such as it was, would soon crumble in light of plate tectonics. But geologists hadn’t yet discovered the secret to the movement of continents.

Whitcomb and Morris argued that the stratigraphic order to the world’s rocks that geologists had painstakingly worked out was fiction because it was based primarily on the idea of fossil succession. They thought geologists used circular reasoning in working out geologic history by interpreting the age of rocks based on the fossils they contained. This would indeed be circular reasoning—if they were right. Instead their words serve to advertise how little they bothered to learn about what they were critiquing and how they conflated geology and evolution.