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 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 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.5
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.
In reality, the most basic aspect of the geological time scale is superposition, Steno’s old idea about which rocks are above or below which other rocks. That fossil succession tracks this order has been confirmed rather than assumed. Stratigraphic relationships are strikingly clear in places like the Grand Canyon where we began our story. One does not need to look at the fossil record to understand which formation lies where in the sequence exposed in the canyon walls.
Whitcomb and Morris pointed to places where older fossil assemblages lay above younger ones as evidence that geologists just made up the stratigraphic column to fit the preconceived idea of fossil succession. But their argument ignores both regional structural mapping, which can track the deformation of folded and faulted beds across the landscape, and well-known ways to determine independently whether sedimentary beds are right side up or upside down—like how the orientation of ripple marks in sand beds or mud cracks in fine-grained rocks reveal the top and bottom of sedimentary rocks. In places where older strata lie on top of younger strata one consistently finds evidence of either folding or thrust faulting, such as upside-down beds, the fault plane itself, or a broken hash of sheared and crushed rock along the fault zone. None of these relationships depends in the slightest on the nature of the fossils that the rocks contain.
Additional ways to tell whether strata are right side up or upside down include the orientation of raindrop craters, graded bedding that records the settling out of different grain sizes (coarser material settles faster and ends up at the base of a deposit), and the orientation of burrows, which obviously extend down from what was then the surface into a deposit because overlying strata did not yet exist.
The very existence of upside-down strata presents a fatal problem for flood
geology. How could sediments settle out upside down during a flood unless gravity were somehow simultaneously switching back and forth during it? If nothing much happened since the Flood, how did geological formations it laid down get flipped upside down? In contrast, given enough time, geological deformation along faults could invert rocks or shuffle the deck of rock formations as continents collided or ground past one another.
As if such concerns were not enough, fossilized coral reefs really provide the nail in the coffin for flood geology. Whitcomb and Morris explain fossil reefs found in the geologic record as ripped up and deposited along with everything else during the Flood. But if you actually go out and look at ancient reefs, as I did at my undergraduate field camp, you find that they are not composed of randomized chunks mixed up in the chaotic detritus of a violent deluge. Instead you generally find a massive limestone core, sometimes with delicate corals still in growth position. Whole reefs are preserved along with the associated lagoons, fore-reef and back-reef zones, and open-water marine environments right where you’d expect to find them in relation to one another in a modern reef. Preserving the spatial arrangement of different parts of a coral reef while ripping it to pieces and flinging them around the globe presents a logical absurdity.
Ignoring the equally awkward question of how Noah could have accommodated a coral reef on the ark, we can readily examine how long it must have taken to form modern reefs after Whitcomb and Morris’s hypothesized Flood, which would have killed off living corals in a slurry of sediment-laden water. Individual corals grow at most about half an inch per year, but reefs generally grow just millimeters a year because surf incessantly pounds them. Even assuming an unreasonably generous centimeter per year growth rate, living reefs more than 1,000 meters thick would require more than 100,000 years to grow.
Additional fatal flaws have been identified in Whitcomb and Morris’s ideas. Problems with their vapor canopy shrouding the early earth in a mild and uniform climate include the awkward issue that suspending even just a third of the water in the modern oceans as a vapor canopy would result in atmospheric pressure at the ground surface great enough to flatten living things like pancakes. The associated greenhouse effect would have led to runaway warming, producing a climate more like Hades than paradise.
Finally, although the Bible does not say a word about sedimentary rock or fossils, Whitcomb and Morris’s own logic refutes flood geologists’ central claim that sedimentary rocks did not exist before the Flood. A literal reading of the Bible requires that such rocks already existed at the time of the Flood because bitumen, the pitch or tar Noah used to caulk the ark (Genesis 6:14), comes from sedimentary rock.
Instead of grappling with these dilemmas, Whitcomb and Morris focused on challenging uniformitarianism, which they saw as the foundation for the greater evil of evolution. But they misunderstood Lyell’s argument, thinking it claimed that things had always been just as they are, rather than that the underlying physical laws were constant. In Lyell’s view, if you wanted to understand the types of deposits that a global flood would leave behind, you’d start by studying the deposits left by big floods. He was trying to develop a sound methodological basis for geology. Bizarrely, after ranting about how Lyell hypnotized generations of geologists, Whitcomb and Morris turned around and adopted his uniformitarian approach in arguing that hydrodynamic forces acted on the debris churned up by the Flood to sort it all out into fossil-bearing strata.
Christian reaction to The Genesis Flood was mixed. Some evangelical magazines praised it for its defense of Genesis, but even Whitcomb admitted that most evangelicals he knew accepted the reality of an old Earth. Yet, the book proved wildly popular among the fundamentalist rank and file, revitalizing flood geology and spawning modern creationism.
Why did Whitcomb and Morris’s young-Earth creationism resonate so loudly among fundamentalists? One critic suggested that it was appealing because, unlike previous creationist books, it included footnotes and looked scholarly. Their emphasis on a plain-sense meaning of the Bible also allowed Whitcomb and Morris to present themselves as more faithful to the Bible than those who reconciled it with science through reinterpretations such as the day-age and gap theories. Their flood geology did not require them to interpret days as meaning ages or to invoke unmentioned gaps in the biblical narrative. According to Whitcomb and Morris, the Bible simply said what it meant—simply. The way they read the Bible appealed to fundamentalists.
They also gained supporters because after generations of self-imposed separatism their audience was almost entirely ignorant of modern geology. And their book appeared just as fundamentalist outrage grew heated over the widespread introduction of high school textbooks that included accounts of evolution in the post-Sputnik attempt to modernize American science education.
Whitcomb and Morris drew a direct line from geology through evolution to the communism they saw threatening Christian America. A century earlier, at the funeral of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels invoked Darwin, crediting Marx for the discovery of the law of economic evolution. A century later, Whitcomb and Morris saw their world under threat from the rise of what they considered an amoral scientific elite that had abandoned Christianity and joined the effort to promote the socialist ideal of the common good. Geology and the evolution it supported lay at the root of the decay of modern society. Like communists, geologists, they believed, must be stopped.
Morris went on to found the Institute for Creation Research, which promotes flood geology to a lay audience through glossy publications and public lectures. With its slick propaganda machine, the Institute spearheaded the rise of young-Earth creationism and continues to influence evangelical thought.
In the mid-1960s a geologist named Davis A. Young appeared to offer Morris a ray of hope in his campaign to upend the geological establishment. The son of an eminent Old Testament scholar, Young studied geological engineering at Princeton in the late 1950s, where he flirted with accepting uniformitarianism. After enrolling in a master’s program in mineralogy at Pennsylvania State University, Young read The Genesis Flood and became convinced that geologists needed to, once again, seek evidence in support of the Flood. Taking up the challenge, he started a PhD program at Brown University, but by 1969 he confessed to Morris that he no longer believed in a global flood. Still deeply committed to scriptural inerrancy, Young became a leading evangelical critic of young-Earth creationism.
In 1972, Morris’s disappointment turned to anger when Young published a letter in a Presbyterian magazine warning that geologically illiterate creationists threatened the credibility of Christianity. Five years later, in his book Creation and the Flood (1977), Young went a step further and accused creationists of advocating junk science and criticized the American Scientific Affiliation for going too far in promoting biblical reinterpretation. Hoping to lead evangelical Christians to middle ground, he echoed nineteenth-century theologians in correlating earth history to the sequence of events reported in Genesis and interpreting the creation week as a figurative week in which the seventh day is ongoing.
Pointing out discrepancies in the genealogical listings presented in different books of the Bible,6 Young maintained that the obvious interpretation of Scripture may not always be the correct one. He held that a careful reading of the Bible revealed no fundamental conflict between science and Christianity.
The Christian scientist is not compelled to reject the concept of the general development of the universe in accordance with physical, chemical, geological, and biological laws and processes formed by God at the very beginning and continuing to the present time.7
Young accused flood proponents like Whitcomb and Morris of relying on untested speculations rooted in pure imagination and maintained that the failure of both the scientific community and mainstream theologians to engage in explaining the biblical deluge helped flood geology remain popular. Young also complained that Christians who defend traditional ideas of the Flood were too quick to appeal to miracles to help them evade scie
ntific difficulties. It was telling how those seeking to support a global deluge consistently claimed as much scientific support as they could marshal and then invoked miracles when their own explanations broke down.
Another awkward problem for creationists lay in their claims that Noah’s Flood deposited the world’s sedimentary rock and that Noah landed his ark on Mount Ararat. Creationists can’t have it both ways: the geologic map of Turkey shows that the stratovolcanoes forming Mount Ararat are built upon and are therefore younger than a whole series of sedimentary rocks. If the mountain itself postdates the Flood, how could Noah have landed on it? Mount Ararat itself eloquently refutes the claim that Noah’s Flood was responsible for laying down all the world’s sedimentary rock.
Before I read The Genesis Flood for myself I had been mystified as to how Whitcomb and Morris could in good faith advocate the discredited ideas that revived modern creationism. But I now see that they latched onto questions for which geologists lacked compelling answers.
In the late 1950s, geologists did not have satisfying explanations either for the relationship of continents to one another or for the origin of mountains. Nineteenth-century scientists generally thought that the breakup of the continents happened early on in earth history. Mountains were thought to have formed as the originally molten planet cooled and contracted. Continents formed in the places in which they were still found, their edges crinkling up into mountains. But the discovery that the radioactive decay of minerals produced substantial heat contradicted the theory that Earth was cooling. And no cooling meant no contracting.
The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood Page 23
