The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood (35 page)

To a geologist like myself, interpreting ancient stories of great floods presents an alluring challenge. I would hope that we can all appreciate how, after centuries of debate and creative explanations, it appears that humanity’s rich legacy of flood stories reflects a variety of ancient disasters. The global pattern of tsunamis, glacial outburst floods, and catastrophic flooding of lowlands like Mesopotamia or the Black Sea basin fits rather well the global distribution and details of flood stories. Considered together, geological and anthropological evidence suggests rational explanations for why flood stories are uncommon in Africa, why they are so different in China, and why they are widespread in the Middle East, northern Europe, America, and all across the Pacific. Time and again, great floods swept worlds away in disasters remarkable enough to shape humanity’s oldest stories, which were then passed down through generations—and civilizations—to become powerful legends.

Every day at work, I walk past a slab of polished rock that elegantly refutes the idea of Noah’s Flood as being the sole event of earth history. It hangs on the wall down the hall from my department’s office and is a gorgeous tableau of colorful sedimentary rocks embedded within different sedimentary rock—a stone tablet made from cobbles, gravel, and sand. Like Steno’s solid within a solid, this conglomerate shows that at least two grand catastrophes or geological cycles played a role in earth history. One cannot stand before it and embrace young-Earth creationism and its single world-wrecking flood without abandoning faith in earth history told by the rocks themselves.

Contrary to creationist claims, reading the geologic record does not depend on paleontology and evolution—they provide complementary constraints on earth history. The astounding degree of agreement between the geologic and fossil records would require miracles upon miracles, were it not simply indicative of the fact that they independently recorded the same grand story.

We need a historically informed understanding of how people read and interpreted sacred texts in the past in order to inform how we read them today. It is as wrong-headed for atheists to assume that religion demands that the faithful read biblical stories literally as it is for the faithful to use scripture to bash modern science. At the same time, those who seek to reconcile science and religion need to confront the intellectual problem of miracles. These different ways of investigating truth come into direct conflict when scientific findings contradict religious beliefs. After all, the creationist view of the week of Creation and Noah’s Flood as a comprehensive record of earth history leaves no room for central discoveries of modern geology like plate tectonics and the realization that long periods of time are required for erosion to sculpt the land.

Throughout church history, biblical commentators from across the theological spectrum used extrabiblical information about the natural world to help interpret the story of Noah’s Flood. Naturally, most wanted to explain their world in terms they understood. After all, who needs a confusing universe? As knowledge of the world grew, so too did explanations for what shaped it. Along the way, concepts of how landscapes evolved changed in ways that paralleled developments in Christian theology. Early conviction that the world was slowly decaying gave way to creative schemes like those involving violent catastrophes to generate Noah’s Flood, and then to grand cycles of repeated catastrophes that destroyed multiple worlds. Finally, the modern concept emerged—a planet on which life, land, and the atmosphere are intimately interconnected and self-renewing through plate tectonics, a process that continually remakes the world over unimaginably deep time.

Before the Reformation, theologians generally agreed that simple folk should accept the Bible as literal fact but that learned persons who could read the original Hebrew and Greek texts might discover deeper meanings. The Protestant idea that anyone could read and interpret the plain words of the Bible for themselves led to a flowering of divergent interpretations. Theological arguments about Noah’s Flood evolved as scientific theories reframed rational explanations and Christians reinterpreted Genesis to accept the knowledge that Earth had a long and dynamic history. It was seen as fruitless to debate the very rocks that made up our world.

That modern creationism is one of the most recently evolved forms of Christianity may surprise today’s fundamentalists. Yet before the rebirth of young-Earth creationism in the 1960s, most fundamentalists subscribed to either the gap or day-age theories that fit geologic time into the opening verses of Genesis.

In fact, the founding fundamentalists did not want to choose between science and religion. One, they believed, leads to greater understanding and knowledge about the way the world works, and the other provides moral and spiritual guidance in navigating the complexities of life, culture, and society. Seen in this light, the varying interpretations of the biblical flood story are part of an ongoing battle for the soul of Christianity. Will it remain a dynamic faith that helps people navigate modern times and understand the world and our place in it? Or will Christianity become locked in a senseless war against reason, as St. Augustine feared? Only time will tell.

Together with mankind’s relationship to the environment, the relationship between science and religion is one of the most important—and difficult—problems facing humanity today. Not surprisingly, these problems are linked. Herein I see another modern lesson of the Noah’s Flood story. Perhaps we would be wise to consider Earth itself as a habitable ark careening around the Sun. Maybe the modern relevance of the story lies not so much in whether it literally describes a particular prehistoric flood, but in a timeless lesson about humanity’s moral responsibility to safeguard creation, as did Noah and his crew.

To me, a literal reading of the Creation in Genesis does not do the story justice. Even a casual reading reveals that days one, two, and three set the stage for days four, five, and six. The creation of light on the first day sets the backdrop for the creation of the sun, moon and stars on the fourth day. The separation of the sky from the waters on the second day sets up the creation of birds and creatures of the sea on the fifth day. The segregation of dry land on the third day sets the stage for the creation of plants and terrestrial animals on the sixth day. This recurring cycle of three is a classic poetic device. I don’t think that the Creation story was intended as historical fact. It’s more akin to epic poetry written to convey the divine origin of our wondrous world and everything in it, however they came about. Genesis 1 remains powerful and relevant today if read as a symbolic polemic intended for early monotheists rather than as a Bronze Age scientific treatise.

One challenge of interpreting Genesis literally lies in its brevity. The Creation is described in the fifty-six verses of Genesis 1–2. Noah’s Flood is covered in the sixty-eight verses of Genesis 6–8. In other words, about all there is in the Bible to explain the 4.5 billion years of earth history is about the same number of sentences on a typical front page of the
New York Times
. One can hardly expect a detailed accounting given that this represents just a couple of dozen sentences per billion years, and that most of these sentences deal with the life and times of Adam, Noah, and company.

One might think that brevity equates with clarity in a simple literal reading of Genesis. But God created light on the first day and didn’t make the Sun until the fourth day. So where did the light and the night come from, and how was the length of the first three days defined? Fish were not even created at all in a literal reading of Genesis, for they are not mentioned. Neither are bacteria, viruses, and insects—or dinosaurs. Does this mean that they evolved after the initial Creation, or that Genesis is not a comprehensive world history? Such questions and the potential for alternative interpretations gave rise to a long history of commentary on how to interpret Genesis, and how to interpret the story of Noah’s Flood in particular.

Perhaps the challenge of interpreting another famous document—the United States Constitution—can help illuminate the problem of trying to understand the Bible. Consider how little liberals and conservatives agree on the meaning of the Constitution, a document only a few thousand words long, written in English not that long ago, whose signed original is on display under glass for all to see. Compare that with the Bible, which was pieced together from partial versions of a work three-quarters of a million words long, handed down between cultures, and translated several times over from a language lacking vowels and spaces between words. Is it any surprise that people today don’t agree on exactly what the Bible means?

Like most geologists, I had come to see Noah’s Flood as a fairy tale—an ancient attempt to explain the mystery of how marine fossils ended up in rocks high in the mountains. Now I’ve come to see the story of Noah’s Flood like so many other flood stories—as rooted in truth. But was it the flooding of the Black Sea, or a great Mesopotamian flood that ravaged the ancestral homeland of Semitic peoples? Who knows? I doubt the historic truth about Noah’s Flood will ever be known with certainty. And I don’t think it really matters. The discoveries of science have revealed the world and our universe to be far more spectacular than could have been imagined by Mesopotamian minds. To still see the world through their eyes is to minimize the wonder of creation.

Our interpretation of the world around us fundamentally shapes our outlook. We will only look for evidence that confirms our beliefs if we have already decided how and what to think about something. But if we keep our minds open, we may be surprised at what we discover. And how we choose to view the world seems to increasingly frame contemporary issues of tremendous societal importance, from climate change to the way we teach science in public schools. At stake is how we interpret nature, and what, if anything, we can learn from the world around us.

Geologists make sense of ancient events by piecing together stories archived in stone and inscribed on the land; we attempt to forge coherent theories that stand up to evidence. Most attempts fail. But that’s central to an ongoing process of pushing old theories until they break in order to improve upon them. Yet, we’ve seen how the scientific establishment can be inherently resistant to change, favoring familiar theories over new or uncomfortable ideas. What distinguishes science from religion is that in science even cherished ideas must stand up to the test of new evidence.

By design, science excludes miracles because there is no way to test them through rational analysis. Science cannot address supernatural or divine action any more than Seattle residents can will away gray skies. Creationists and advocates of intelligent design seize upon this fundamental limitation of the scientific method to allege that science denies the existence of God. But science can no more prove God does not exist than it can prove He (or She) does exist. And no matter how much we learn about the material characteristics, properties, and history of the universe, such knowledge will not explain why the universe exists or how it came to have the properties it does. This will always be a matter of speculation—or faith.

However, we cannot simply compartmentalize science and religion into tidy, noncompeting domains because some scientific discoveries are not compatible with particular religious beliefs. Few religious ideas can be tested, but some are refutable. Science has demonstrated that once-conventional beliefs concerning the physical world are wrong—like the ideas that we live at the center of the universe on a six-thousand-year-old planet shaped by Noah’s Flood. I believe faith and science can peacefully coexist, so long as we don’t founder on or cling to the rocky shore of either. What this requires is open-minded thinking guided by humanity’s greatest asset—the gift of reason.

Naturally, there is bound to be some friction between science and religion because they offer very different ways to assess truth. The long history of interaction between geology and Christianity includes times when they reinforced one another and times when they clashed. The story of Noah’s Flood shows how the different beliefs of various branches of Christianity are shaped by which parts of the Bible their devotees read literally and which they interpret allegorically. Over time, Christian thought has sorted itself out along a continuum of belief. The modern view of inherent conflict is championed most vociferously by those who keep the conflict going—creationists and militant atheists who share little else than the belief that faith in God and science are incompatible. Most people, however, hold beliefs somewhere between these two extremes.

In reality, there is a wide spectrum of possible beliefs about the relationship of God to the material world. At one end is belief in an engaged, helpful personal God who rides shotgun on everyday activities and can intervene at anytime to favor the outcome of specific events, like a coin toss or a football game. Others believe in a more strategic God that intervenes only occasionally to shape the course of history or important events, like elections or wars. Farther along the continuum of belief is a more distant God responsible for creating the universe and the laws governing the world. At this end of the philosophical spectrum are the beliefs that God directed and planned the course of events in advance, and the view that the universe is a glorious but random experiment. Still others ascribe no role in the universe for a God at all.

While religion cannot adequately address scientific questions, accepting scientific truths need not mean abandoning morality, purpose, and meaning in life. And just because science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God does not mean that it says religious faith is an illusion. Thoughtful discussions of the relationship between science and religion are impossible when fundamentalists disguise religious arguments as science and scientists dismiss religion as childish superstition. In reality, faith and reason need not be enemies if one views ignorance as the enemy of both. Should humans be afraid of an enigmatic universe whose mysteries elude us? Or should we struggle to decipher the mysteries of our world and how it works, whether for simple intellectual joy and challenge, to reap practical benefits, or to gain insight into the mind of God—whatever one imagines that to be.