The following year, in 1695, he published his essay, arguing that the Flood dissolved Earth’s primitive crust, leaving no trace of the original world. Adopting Steno’s principles, Woodward’s ideas and the evidence he offered to back them up came from studying Britain’s rocks and fossils. Convinced that fossils were the remains of organisms that perished in the Flood, he was more concerned with what the event accomplished than in how it came about.
Woodward was one of many natural historians whose homeland’s landforms and geological features figured prominently in their thinking. It’s no chance happening that English savants greatly influenced the explanation of fossil life. Their country, and much of its well-exposed coastline, is rich with fossils. I have no doubt that my own geological perspective on big floods would be quite different had I only stayed within several hundred miles of where I grew up in northern California and had never seen wonders like the Tsangpo Gorge and the Grand Canyon.
A good scientist also draws on the experience and observations of others, and despite his famous arrogance, Woodward borrowed Steno’s idea that all strata were deposited as great horizontal sheets. He, too, argued that one could read the history of deformation from the orientation of formerly flat-lying rock. Like Steno, Woodward thought that topography formed during the same event that disrupted the rocks. Convinced that the only true philosophy was based on careful observation, he believed that his account of earth history confirmed that a great flood reshaped the world.
In Woodward’s day, many natural philosophers accepted the idea that a mighty flood burst forth from a subterranean abyss. In keeping with then conventional wisdom, Woodward invoked a violent torrent to rip up and dissolve the planet’s entire crust, mix it up, and suspend it in the raging waters. As the Flood receded, dense stuff settled out first, followed by lighter stuff. This resurfacing created the modern world, leaving fossils set in the resolidified detritus after the show was over.
To Woodward the problem was what triggered wholesale dissolution of Earth’s surface. Inverting Newton’s recognition that gravity held solid bodies together, he proposed that a temporary suspension of gravity dissolved the world into a chaotic mass. If God just flicked gravity off and then on again, it would create an instant deluge. Things settled out when gravity turned back on, sorted by weight into distinct layers—like those seen in rocks. Organic fibers, the very fabric of nature, would hold plant and animal tissue together, allowing fossils to remain intact in the resolidified earth. Then, after the Flood, some of the new layers settled and others rose, forming modern topography.
Woodward also appreciated the theological implications of a remodeled world. Foremost to him was how it revealed the second half of God’s plan: “ ’Tis very plain that the Deluge was not sent only as an Executioner to Mankind: but that its prime Errand was to Reform and New-mold the Earth.”8 Before the Flood, the world was incredibly fertile, a perfect Eden where one need not plow or even plant to reap nature’s bounty. But with idle hands having led to humanity’s downfall, it made sense that God would remake the world into a place of no free rides, where eking out an existence required constant labor. Destroying the world, and mankind along with it, was the ultimate act of kindness.
For the Destruction of the Earth was not only an Act of the profoundest Wisdom and Forecast, but the most monumental Proof, that could ever possibly have been, of Goodness, Compassion, and Tenderness, in the Author of our Being.9
For naturalists, Woodward’s theory improved upon Burnet’s in that it explained how fossils came to be incorporated into rocks. Still, Woodward caught even more flack than Burnet because he made a simple testable prediction—what we today consider a hallmark of good science. If Woodward was right, then the rocks and fossils within them would be ordered from densest on the bottom to lightest on top, reflecting the order in which things settled out.
Critics quickly pointed out how the heaviest fossils were often found on the surface rather than deep underground. Some objected to Woodward’s idea of a turbulent globe-dissolving flood when the sedimentary strata it supposedly deposited showed signs of having settled down through tranquil water.
Woodward was considered brilliant by some, but his arrogance and habit of making enemies contributed to his undoing. In 1697, London physician John Arbuthnot gleefully skewered him in An Examination of Dr. Woodward’s Account of the Deluge. It not only laid out problems with Woodward’s theory but showed that the great blowhard had plagiarized Steno. Arbuthnot paired sections of Steno’s obscure book with virtually identical sections from Woodward’s popular essay. In passage after passage, Woodward had cribbed Steno without acknowledging his source. As it turned out, exposure of this act of intellectual theft helped promote Steno’s ideas.
Arbuthnot’s devastating critique stamped Woodward’s account of the biblical flood as contrary to the laws of nature. How could the Flood have been violent enough to churn up and dissolve the entire surface of the world, and yet preserve both marine life and delicate plant fossils? Besides, Woodward’s assertion that rocks and fossils were arranged on the basis of specific gravity was wrong. Arbuthnot himself had descended into a two-hundred-foot-deep pit in Amsterdam and found the density of the layers to be variable and not ordered by depth. Contrary to Woodward’s theory, heavy layers lay on top of lighter ones. Fellows of the Royal Society of London corroborated Arbuthnot’s findings, reporting that it was common to find denser strata overlying lower-density rocks.
Arbuthnot even conducted laboratory tests to disprove Woodward’s basic contention, finding that when an oyster shell and an equal weight of metal powder were dropped into a tank of water, the oyster shell sank to the bottom first. His simple experiment showed that size and shape influenced how fast things settled. Arbuthnot calculated that Woodward needed a flood 450 miles deep to turn the world into a slurry of half earth and half water, a scenario he ridiculed with dry wit: “The Doctor should have calculated the Proportions of his Drugs before he mix’d them.”10 Just as with Burnet, Woodward’s critics eventually took his theory down. That the rocks did not back up his story earned Woodward the distinction of having proposed one of the first grand geological theories to be formally refuted.
There was no shortage of subsequent fantasylike theories of the Flood, including one from astronomer Edmund Halley involving his namesake Halley’s comet. When his predicted return of a comet to European skies came true in September 1682, the popularity of comets surged among both the general public and natural philosophers. Two years later, Halley read a pair of papers to the Royal Society in which he argued that in dictating Genesis to Moses, God left out most of earth history. Fossils found far above the sea convinced Halley, like many before him, that the biblical flood was indeed global. Noting that God used natural means to carry out His will, and that forty days and nights of rain could not possibly submerge the highest mountains, Halley proposed that the shock from a comet passing close by Earth knocked the world off its axis, sending the oceans sloshing back and forth across the continents. The resulting devastation heaved the seafloor up into great piles, forming mountains and carving the topography we know today.
Even if the forty inches of rain that typically fell in a year in England’s wettest counties instead fell each day for forty days and nights, it would only inundate coastal lowlands. So Halley drummed up another source in an act of God. A great vapor canopy God had originally placed above the firmament to enshroud the primordial Earth collapsed and dropped enough water to account for Noah’s Flood. Three centuries later the founders of modern creationism resurrected this highly imaginative idea as their own vapor canopy theory.
Halley’s second paper presented far more radical ideas. Maybe the comet hit more than four thousand years ago. Maybe such global calamities occurred many times in the past, and might even recur in the future. Periodic catastrophes might even be necessary to refresh Earth’s surface once soils eroded and could no longer support life. He admitted to struggling with the theological implica
tions of a world designed to require periodic destruction, and was terrified of what the church might think of his views. Less brave than Galileo, Halley refused to publish his papers and instead deposited them in the Royal Society’s archives, with the proviso that they be published after his death.
Two years after Halley’s address, in 1696, one of those in attendance, William Whiston, a Newton protégé and chaplain to the Bishop of Norwich, borrowed Halley’s comet for A New Theory of the Earth. A combination of Newtonian physics, biblical interpretation, and occasional facts, Whiston’s book also described the planet being knocked off its axis as it passed through the tail of a great comet. Whiston spun another tale from that point. Torrential rain from the comet’s atmosphere opened the floodgates of heaven. The gravitational attraction of this near miss created enormous stresses as the rocky crust stretched and contracted under the influence of subterranean tides. As the crust cracked, the combination of torrential rain and water liberated from below scoured the world’s surface. Then the floodwaters neatly drained back down into the abyss, leaving the churned-up mess to settle back into place much as Woodward had described.
Not everybody was impressed with such theories. Oxford astronomy professor John Keill published a critique of Burnet’s and Whiston’s arguments that condemned both men as “makers of imaginary worlds and loosers of imaginary floods.”11 Keill derisively labeled Burnet’s book a “Philosophical Romance” because an originally smooth world bathed in perpetual sunlight would be uninhabitable.12
Rivers would not run on Burnet’s perfectly smooth Earth. With no slope to drive the current, rivers could not flow. They would “stagnate and stink,” making for “uncomfortable living.”13 With no rain and no flowing surface water, Keill thought that the land between the foul rivers would have been more like Hades than Paradise.
And Burnet’s rocky crust could never float like clay flakes on an ocean of water. It would sink as soon as it consolidated. Besides, Keill noted, Genesis revealed that antediluvian society had iron tools, and thus Earth’s original crust must have contained iron. Yet if Burnet was right, dense iron particles would have settled rapidly down through the abyss and would never have become incorporated into the crust in the first place. Keill dismissed Burnet as a victim of excessive imagination who used clever rhetoric to charm logic to sleep.
Still, that wasn’t the biggest flaw in Burnet’s theory. Had the warmth of the Sun been able to penetrate Earth’s surface and heat the inner sea enough to crack the crust, it would have baked the planet’s surface, raising insurmountable questions about Noah’s Flood.
Certainly there could be no necessity for a Deluge in that case, except it were to cool the Earth again after such an excessive heat, which must have destroyed all the Animals, Plants, and Trees which were upon the earth, and have turned them into Glass.14
Keill likewise demolished Whiston’s theory by showing that there would not be enough pressure in a comet’s tail to generate torrential rains. Keill further calculated that the gravitational pull of a passing comet would not deform a subterranean abyss, thereby burying yet another idea attempting to explain Noah’s Flood.
Curiously, Keill the astronomer was a deeply religious natural philosopher not inclined to rationally explain the miraculous. He was comfortable with the Flood’s being an event not amenable to scientific explanation. While the astronomer Keill preferred to invoke miracles to explain earth history, the cleric Burnet sought to demonstrate that it happened through natural processes.
Today, long after such fundamental ironies have been forgotten, seventeenth-century ideas still frame the essential arguments that creationists offer to reconcile geological evidence with their presumed reality of a global deluge. The key difference, of course, is that seventeenth-century philosophers did not blindly trust particular literal interpretations of scripture. They had faith reason would lead to enlightened interpretation of God’s creation, as read from the pages of the book of nature—the rocks themselves.
As natural philosophers began to better understand the universe and its workings, attitudes toward mountains underwent radical change. Long seen as ugly, inconvenient, and dangerous, the Alps became Europe’s prime tourist attraction by the end of the eighteenth century. At the same time, theologians gradually came to see mountains as beautiful natural cathedrals—spiritually uplifting examples of the magnificence of creation rather than evidence of a ruined world, the broken remnants of a wrecked paradise.
Geologists today tend to forget that the foundation of modern geology, Steno’s deceptively simple idea that younger rocks lay on top of older ones, was introduced to help explain how Noah’s Flood shaped the Italian landscape. Yet Steno’s story remains one of the best examples of the complex interplay between geology and theology, setting off and setting up debates that continue to this day. Although Steno’s greatest insight was that the present arrangement of the layers that make up our world can be used to read its history, his greatest impact was on shaping the views of generations of students he never met. The more natural philosophers applied Steno’s rules to the geologic record, the more they discovered about how the rocks revealed a much longer story than the traditional biblically inspired history of the world.
5
A Mammoth Problem
TODAY, GEOLOGISTS KNOW THAT more than 99 percent of all animal species that have ever lived are extinct. You don’t have to know any geology to know that trilobites, dinosaurs, and saber-toothed tigers no longer live among us (unless you count birds as modern dinosaurs). Given this, it makes no sense to argue that Noah’s Flood explains the world’s fossils. If that were the case, it would mean the Flood not only caused extinctions but killed off almost all the world’s then living species—the very thing that Noah supposedly built his ark to prevent in the first place.
But in the opening days of the eighteenth century, naturalists and theologians alike were confident that extinctions had no place in God’s plan. Almost everyone assumed that living examples of fossils would eventually turn up as more of the world was explored. Vigorous arguments continued to rage over how God triggered Noah’s Flood, but after Steno, Burnet, and Woodward, natural philosophers increasingly interpreted internment of once-living creatures in rocks as compelling evidence of a divine disaster. After all, there was no way to know how old fossils were, no way to date when they had lived—or had died. Wasn’t the simplest answer that they had died all at once?
If the only idea you have to explain rocks and topography is a big flood, then you will naturally tend to interpret the evidence you find in terms of a big flood for as long as you can. Even scientists today are not immune to interpreting evidence, at least initially, through the lens of prevailing ideas and their preconceived notions. Centuries ago, when natural philosophers learned of fossils near the crest of the Andes, they concluded that the biblical flood parked the bones of sea creatures within South America’s highest mountains.
A problematic detail, however, muddied the waters—some fossils did not correspond to any known living species. One of the most striking fossils common in the layered (sedimentary) rocks of England were ammonites, snail-like marine animals with spiral shells characterized by distinctively crenulated partitions that created internal chambers. There was a dizzying array of different species and types of fossil ammonites, ranging in size from inches to several feet across. They were found throughout certain rock formations across southern England and were literally falling out of the cliffs to litter beaches along the English Channel. Yet nothing like them had ever been found alive anywhere in the world. Their closest living relative seemed to be pearly nautilus, an exotic chambered shell with simpler, noncrenulated partitions from the East Indies. Most natural philosophers shrugged off this problem, confident that someday someone would dredge a living ammonite up from the sea. They thought that only a flood of awesome power, the biblical flood, could have entombed on land creatures thought to live in the very deepest part of the ocean.
The views of diluvialists—those who invoked Noah’s Flood to explain what they found in the rocks—dominated geological thinking until natural philosophers demonstrated that fossils were extinct and that Earth had a much longer and more complicated history.
A leading voice of the diluvialists was Johann Scheuchzer, one of continental Europe’s great fossil enthusiasts. After completing a doctorate in medicine at Utrecht in 1694, he returned home to Zurich, where he eventually became a professor of mathematics. Insatiably curious about the natural world, Scheuchzer served as the secretary of a weekly club that held lively discussions on controversial topics such as whether the devil could physically seduce a woman and whether mountains were created along with the world or formed during Noah’s Flood.
Scheuchzer’s passionate interest in Swiss natural history led to extensive walking tours through the Alps. Accompanied by his students, he made geological observations and was the first to measure—by carrying a barometer up a mountainside—how air pressure changed with altitude. Fossils especially fascinated him. He had been taught they were mineral oddities whose origin could be explained by physics and chemistry.
When Scheuchzer read Woodward’s essay, he realized that fossils really were ancient creatures. Right under his nose, entombed in his own rock collection, were the remains of snails, seashells, fishes, and plants. This revelation prompted his own landmark work in 1708, The Fishes’ Complaint and Vindication, in which Scheuchzer lampooned the still popular idea that fossils were inorganic objects that just happened to resemble real creatures. He shaped his narrative from the point of view of a fossil fish who complained in formal Latin about not being recognized as an innocent victim of the flood sent to destroy mankind.
The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood Page 8
