A century before, in 1842, a missionary named Moffat told the tale of how he could not find a flood legend among South Africans until one of the Khoikhoi (whom colonists called Hottentots) told him the story of a great flood. The man assured Moffat that this was a tale of his forefathers, and that Moffat was the first missionary he had ever met. Later, in comparing notes with another missionary, Moffat learned that his colleague had indeed told his native informant the story of Noah’s Flood. This shows how difficult it is to determine the origin of many flood myths due to the potential for unrecorded cultural transmissions.
Unsurprisingly, people living in flood-prone estuaries are likely to have stories of a great flood. The estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers receives its water from the mountains of Turkey and Iraq, and a warm spring rainstorm falling onto a heavy snow pack can submerge the whole floodplain under many feet of water. When the levees burst there is nowhere to go as everything slips under water. Every now and then people living in this region were forced to flee to higher ground or pack their possessions and animals onto a boat or raft as their world sank beneath floodwaters. The lack of well-documented flood myths from Egypt and the Nile River may be due to the fact that the Nile gets its water from sources far to the south in equatorial Africa. Fed by a chain of great lakes in the East African Rift, the river’s annual discharge does not vary anywhere near as much as in Mesopotamia. The predictably moderate annual flood was no threat, it was the source of life.
How long could stories of a great flood survive oral transmission from one generation to the next? Examples of stories that have been passed down through oral transmission for thousands of years have been reported from several continents. My favorite is a Klamath Indian story, recorded in 1865. It provides a compelling eyewitness account of the eruption of Mount Mazama, which formed Oregon’s Crater Lake more than 7,600 years ago. For tens of thousands of years, our preliterate ancestors conveyed knowledge from one generation to the next through oral traditions. For a story to survive retelling over many generations it has to be viewed as important, it must continue to have relevance or relate to something still visible to listeners, and it must be highly memorable. Stories of a great flood satisfy all three criteria, particularly in flood-prone regions.
Upon reflection, my theory that flood stories from around the world are grounded in reality is plausible. For tens of thousands of years, oral traditions were the only means of transmitting information from one generation to the next. And while not all stories bear retelling, tales of disastrous, displacing floods were sure to be retold for generations. Just think of your own family’s lore. It’s not the day-to-day events that get passed on, it’s the big, memorable things.
After the devastating blows to flood geology in the first half of the nineteenth century, geologists increasingly avoided debates over how to account for the biblical flood. The educated consensus was that just because it was written for an audience with a Mesopotamian knowledge of earth science didn’t mean that the Book of Genesis wasn’t written to convey the majesty, scope, and power of creation.
By the end of the nineteenth century, mainstream geologists had lost interest in the Deluge. It was a settled matter. Noah’s Flood was widely seen as a local historical event in the Middle East, even if its precise nature remained debatable.
Thomas Huxley, the last survivor of the generation of prominent scientists who lived through the battles over Lyell’s and Darwin’s work, even wrote an essay arguing that a global deluge inundating the world was a fable that conflicted with geological evidence. He recalled the century’s changes in the relation between geology and Christianity:
At the present time, it is difficult to persuade serious scientific inquirers to occupy themselves, in any way, with the Noachian Deluge. They look at you with a smile and a shrug, and say they have more important matters to attend to… . But it was not so in my youth. At that time, geologists and biologists could hardly follow to the end of any path of inquiry without finding the way blocked by Noah and his ark, or by the first chapter of Genesis; and it was a serious matter, in this country at any rate, for a man to be suspected of doubting the literal truth of the Diluvial… history.11
Huxley virtually credits Lyell with single-handedly creating the science of geology, ignoring the contributions of Buckland, Sedgwick, and others who also struggled with and turned against the idea of a global flood. Perhaps Huxley relegated them to the background because of their membership in the clergy, the villains of his story. Huxley’s portrayal of a century-long battle between Lyell’s rationalism and blind faith in a catastrophic global flood fostered the perception of an ages-old war between Christianity and science.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, geologists were almost entirely uniformitarians. Lyell’s dictate that the present was the key to the past had become geological dogma. A growing body of geological evidence and alternative explanations for Siberian mammoth carcasses effectively dismantled the remaining fragments of a case for a global deluge as the primary driving force in earth history. But over the course of the twentieth century, the rise of flood geology proponents among evangelical Christians fostered the view that geology and faith—science and religion—could not peacefully coexist. Instead of trying to refine their understanding of the biblical flood story in light of new knowledge, radically conservative Christians broke with those who acknowledged scientific findings and began to ignore, selectively cherry-pick, and actively undermine science to support their favorite literal interpretation of the Bible. Today, we know them as creationists.
10
Dinosaurs in Paradise
WHEN I HEARD THAT the new Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, featured exhibits showing people picnicking with dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden, I had to see it. Nothing could have prepared me for a dinosaur-petting-zoo version of natural history. Upon entering, I was greeted by a diorama showcasing a velociraptor straight out of Jurassic Park calmly standing beside Eve while she feeds a squirrel.
Visitors pass a ticket checker dressed up as a Park Ranger stationed at a Grand Canyon National Park sign, then navigate a fake bedrock canyon designed to enthrall kids and arrive at a large two-panel board that addresses the issue of the age of the universe. The left-hand side says that reason holds the universe to be billions of years old. The right-hand side indicates that God says that it all began six thousand years ago. So which should we believe—reason or God, the creator of reason?
I was prepared for unusual perspectives, but one of the next panels caught me off guard by endorsing evolution. Its diagrams illustrated several versions of the tree of life to contrast the scientific view with the creationist view of what really happened. Alongside the conventional portrayal of life evolving from single-celled organisms to modern flora and fauna, the display illustrated how a limited number of species in God’s original “creation orchard” started branching into new species before Noah’s Flood. Afterward, some, like dinosaurs, went extinct, while their luckier peers rapidly flowered into modern species. The diagram for humans stood out as a simple straight line, showing no change from Creation to the present.
More surprises awaited me down the next hall, where floor-to-ceiling panels asserted that scientists throughout history conspired to question, destroy, discredit, criticize, poison, and replace God’s Word. In this view, the dangerous brotherhood of science is humanity’s common enemy. Reason threatens us all.
After absorbing the anti-reason display, visitors advance to the modern world through a graffiti-filled alleyway, where mock windows voyeuristically display videos of a teenage boy watching pornography and a girl seeking an abortion. Across the alley a wrecking ball demolishing a church is branded with giant letters spelling out “millions of years.” The message is clear. Belief in geologic time drives the decay of modern society.
Moving through the next display, a Garden of Eden diorama where people and dinosaurs frolic together and signage says carnivores didn’t eat meat, I came to the
creationist perspective on geology. The exhibit told how Noah’s crowded ark surfed a great wave that swept back and forth across the world. After the world-remodeling Flood, nothing much happened, except for a few volcanic eruptions and earthquakes scattered here and there throughout history. That rivers and glaciers could sculpt topography is summarily dismissed as the deranged product of human reason.
In this depiction, geologic time never happened. Gone are centuries of painstaking work to piece together the story of our planet. Gone are the overlapping tree-ring records that meticulously matched up patterns of annual growth to reach back more than ten thousand years. Gone are the hundreds of thousands of individual layers recording annual snowfall recovered from cores drilled through the polar ice caps. Gone are the revelations of plate tectonics that elegantly tied earth history together in a unifying framework, explaining the form of continents and their wanderings over millions of years. Gone, in fact, is nearly all of earth history.
In addition to the inherently untestable idea that a divine being created the universe with a particular plan in mind, creationists advocate testable interpretations of earth history. Because their ideas have failed when put to the test, they declare reason to be their enemy.
Even minimal geologic training equips one to see how the material displayed in some of these exhibits contradicts the interpretive signage. For example, dinosaur tracks preserved in layers of sedimentary rock present a serious problem for creationists. How could land animals have been walking around on the seafloor during an event that ripped up Earth’s surface before depositing their bones in the very stuff they were walking around on? Likewise, it is readily verifiable that it takes more vigorous flow to erode hard bedrock than to deposit loose sediment. How, then, could the peak of the Flood have laid down all the sedimentary rocks before the waning stages ripped open the Grand Canyon and carved out the world’s topography?
And why does this museum have so many displays showing giant reptiles hanging out with Adam and Eve when the Bible doesn’t even mention dinosaurs? Because if Noah’s Flood is pretty much all there was to earth history since the Creation, then dinosaurs must have lived alongside people in the days before the Flood. How did such beliefs gain traction?
We can trace the roots of modern creationism back to the nineteenth century, when geology emerged as a profession distinct from theology and natural philosophy. As geologists abandoned Noah’s Flood as a central subject and moved on to other pursuits, Christianity splintered into those willing to accept geological findings and those who insisted on the reality of a global flood. The later conflict over evolution served to strengthen such differences. As mainstream Protestants and Catholics adapted biblical interpretation to accommodate geology, a new breed of American fundamentalists defended the reality of a world-destroying flood as central to their faith.
The Bible was one of the only traditional sources of authority that emerged from the American Revolution unscathed (despite the best efforts of Thomas Paine). The war fostered independence in multiple forms and encouraged the revolutionary conviction that everyone (except women and slaves) possessed both common and moral sense. American Protestants began rejecting traditional forms of authority, confident their own vision would lead them closer to God. This commonsense populism paved the way for the fundamentalism that, in turn, spawned modern creationism.
In the early nineteenth century, camp meetings and revivals brought organized religion along as westward migration took people far from the established churches of the eastern seaboard. One of the first, Kentucky’s Cane Ridge Revival of 1801, was attended by thousands eager to hear populist preachers, gamble, and carouse—not necessarily in that order. The popularity of the weeklong meeting taught frontier preachers a winning strategy for spreading the Gospel across America.
In contrast to Presbyterian denominations that disciplined ministers who participated in boisterous revivals, Methodists and Baptists used the rowdy meetings to swell their ranks. Employing charismatic preachers with little or no education who could relate to the masses heading west, these sects grew into the largest Protestant congregations by the close of the frontier.
Populist preachers who considered the common sense of ordinary men more reliable than opinions espoused by seminary-trained theologians and book-learned professors encouraged people to cast off the chains of religious authority and interpret the Bible for themselves. The most successful preachers—those whose flocks grew the fastest—adopted popular language and manners. When coupled with belief in the Bible as the sole source of religious authority, populism encouraged settling theological disputes in the court of public opinion where everyone was entitled to interpret the Bible for him- or herself. This produced an interpretive free-for-all in which discredited ideas could compete with reasonable ones.
Sectarianism flourished in America’s religious marketplace. Splinter groups left mainstream denominations in disputes over doctrine, practice, and/or belief. Although the founders of these new denominations obviously disagreed on matters important to them, most shared the belief that the Bible was the only real authority for Christians and that its meaning was laid out plainly. Scripture meant exactly what it said, even if they didn’t agree on what it meant.
The advent of the American Civil War presented a theological crisis for American Christians. Both North and South used the Bible to either condemn or defend slavery. How could a plain-sense interpretation of scripture be infallible if one side had to be wrong? Such dilemmas only hardened divergent interpretations of the Bible.
Conservative Protestants began to forge a reactionary biblical literalism, based on biblical inerrancy. They believed that admitting even the slightest error in or sign of human influence on the sacred text would undermine the whole notion of Christian salvation. One need not look for deeper meanings because common sense tells us what the Bible means. Efforts to uphold literal, plain-sense scriptural interpretations began to distance evangelicals from mainstream thought.
Fundamentalism arose among conservative Protestants who viewed liberal accommodation of modern ideas and values as a betrayal of the core doctrines they viewed as fundamental to their faith. Foremost among these was biblical inerrancy. In 1895, the founding fathers of fundamentalism declared this doctrine one of the “five points of fundamentalism” at the Niagara Bible Conference where they staked out their unnegotiable beliefs. Two decades later, the conservative Protestant academics who authored The Fundamentals, a series of essays published between 1910 and 1915 that gave birth to fundamentalism, attacked critical historical and literary analysis that questioned biblical authority.
At first fundamentalists did not insist on strict biblical literalism. The Bible could not be wrong, but interpretations could adapt as needed to preserve biblical infallibility. The Bible could be read in different ways. The original fundamentalists juggled what to read figuratively and what to read literally in order to preserve biblical infallibility. Their approach was surprisingly flexible in comparison to their counterparts today. Most accepted an old Earth through either the day-age theory or the gap theory and were open to the idea that Noah’s Flood may have been a local affair that wiped out humanity’s roots.
By the 1920s, a loose coalition of militant Protestants began to characterize liberals as false Christians who had lost faith in traditional beliefs and doctrines. Claiming to defend the true faith, newly militant fundamentalists combined biblical inerrancy with biblical literalism. Their zeal to combat biblical criticism lay in the conviction that admitting the Bible had a history colored by human fallibility opened the door to doubting redemption through Christ. A literal reading founded on biblical inerrancy formed the levee fundamentalists built to save the Bible from the flood of modernism.
Fundamentalists became increasingly isolated as their efforts to stem the rising tide of liberal thought failed to sway mainstream denominations in the 1930s. They then focused on building their own network of churches and schools dedicated to teaching bibli
cal infallibility. As fundamentalists began slipping into a self-contained world, the recycled arguments of flood geology seemed to provide fresh ammunition for the fight to ban teaching evolution in public schools—and its heretical foundation in an ancient Earth.
By the mid-twentieth century, conservatives militantly pushing literal biblical interpretation stopped interacting with geologists just as breakthroughs like the ability to use radioactive decay to directly date the age of rocks and fossils began to revolutionize the earth sciences. Paleontologists, in particular, threw cold water on the creationist idea that mammoths were flash-frozen or buried in a sudden environmental calamity.
In 1929, Carnegie Museum curator of paleontology Innokenty Tolmachoff meticulously described the circumstances and condition of every known mammoth carcass discovery dating back to the seventeenth century. Three dozen sites pretty much accounted for them all. Noting evidence that mammoths ate great volumes of tundra grass in the summer, Tolmachoff lambasted claims that mammoths roamed a more temperate Siberia. Mammoths were creatures of the ice age, not victims of it. They only went extinct at the end of the last glaciation.
Tolmachoff also reported that stories of mammoth carcasses preserved well enough to eat were greatly exaggerated. Dogs greedily devoured thawed mammoth, but people found it inedible. As far as he could tell, there was no basis for tales of great feasts prepared from their frozen carcasses. Firsthand accounts consistently reported putrid flesh in advanced states of decay. And the circumstances surrounding their discovery suggested that mammoths became stuck in soft mud, were caught in collapsed thawing ground, or drowned along big rivers. They died mundane, solitary deaths.
The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood Page 18
