Old Earth

by Gary Grossman

  “His Holiness requests your presence in Rome.”

  “But, as you can see, I am in ill health. An extended trip to Rome will take its toll.” Galileo coughed, not just for effect. He was sick.

  His request was denied. In late January, 1633, Galileo began an arduous journey to Rome in the dead of winter. Twenty-three days later, two days before his sixty-ninth birthday, weakened by crippling sciatic pain, he took up residency in the Florentine embassy. Over the next four months, he tried to get his strength back to endure the private hearings and public humiliation. As he prepared, Galileo feared for what the Inquisitors would conclude from his writing given their strict Biblical interpretations, and what they might find if they explored further. He was certain the punishment would be death.

  Fourteen

  Makoshika State Park, MT

  The discussion from earlier in the day continued around a campfire.

  McCauley used the time to better understand his team, their individual abilities and personal perspectives, and whether they could also listen and work well with others. It was good information for him and a character building exercise for them.

  “Play the devil’s advocate now,” McCauley said.

  “I’m not sure the devil needs an advocate,” Al Jaffe chided.

  The gang laughed.

  “Okay, okay. Got me,” McCauley acknowledged. “What I want are arguments in the affirmative that the earth is under ten thousand years old. And as you do, remember, you’re representing the view of nearly fifty percent of the country. Who’s first?”

  The crackling wood in the fire pit didn’t drown anyone out because no one volunteered. McCauley could read the faces in the glow of the flames. This was going to be harder than he thought.

  “I’ll kick it off with an assumption: Evolution cannot be observed. Therefore it doesn’t exist.”

  It worked. Anna Chohany jumped right in. “But fossils—”

  “Fossils? There aren’t any transitional fossils,” the professor quickly countered. “If the ancestor of today’s horse, supposedly Miohippus, evolved from Mesohippus, where are its fossils? And again, don’t argue against the proposition, speak in favor that since evolution cannot be observed in real time, it does not exist.”

  “All right, though there are ways to support evolution under the microscope,” Adam Lobel offered.

  “Nope. Stick with the argument.”

  Leslie Cohen raised her hand ready to join the conversation, but Lobel held the floor.

  “There’s the erosion of Niagara Falls. I could argue that it absolutely lines up with the timeline of a few thousand years since the flood. It proves we live on a young Earth because its erosion is consistent with biblical fact.”

  “Not a lot of support, but it would make a strong sermon,” McCauley noted. “Give me more detailed thought that debunks deep time, the long-held view of evolutionists.”

  Cohen put her hand down.

  “Can I try again?” Lobel asked.

  McCauley laughed. “Okay, sure. Back to the gentleman from Penn State.”

  “The Grand Canyon. It was cut by the receding waters after the flood.”

  “The Flood?” Trent asked.

  “THE Flood,” Lobel responded. “The Noah’s Ark flood.”

  “Got it, but to do so, the water would have had to rush through five times the speed of sound.” Trent was highly sarcastic.

  “Whoa. I said no counter arguments. Not yet,” McCauley proclaimed. “Only positions that speak to our inhabiting a young earth.”

  Anna Chohany was ready again. “Where are the geologic columns of recognizable soil layers? If deep time was correct, with two hundred million years of life on earth, there should be an overabundance of evidence in fossilized soil formation.” Role playing, the Harvard grad student sounded indignant. “There isn’t any!”

  Al Jaffe stood up. “Ladies and gentlemen, both the Royal Greenwich Observatory and the U.S. Naval Observatory have made exacting measurements that show our sun is shrinking at a rate of roughly five feet per hour. Moreover, records of a dwindling number of solar eclipses over the last four centuries reinforce the shrinkage. A smaller sun by the year, fewer opportunities for the heavenly phenomena to occur. Even the most zealous evolutionists would have to deduce that if the sun existed millions of years ago, it would have been so ginormous that it would have cooked the earth and no species could have lived here. Ergo, young Earth.”

  His argument brought a round of applause.

  “Nice job, Mr. Jaffe. Deeper reasoning. You may sit down now.”

  “There are other astronomical arguments. Anyone? Mr. Tamburro?”

  “Well,” he started slowly. “This wasn’t going to be my example, but I can go with it. Up there.” He pointed to the crescent moon. “Consider the rate the moon accumulates meteoritic dust. If it were really billions of years old, that layer should be a mile deep. NASA was concerned about that when they sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon. They worried that they’d sink into dust. But there was very little, which to them proved that the moon, like the Earth, is young.”

  “Hadn’t considered that,” McCauley said, complimenting him. “Let’s go back to Leslie. Looks like you’ve been thinking something through.”

  “I have. It’s about the spin down rate of the earth.”

  “The what?” Rodriguez asked.

  “The spin down rate,” she repeated. “Atomic clocks have measured the earth’s rate of rotation for the past three decades to billionths of a second. They’ve found that the earth is slowing down almost a second a year. If the earth were as old as the evolutionists claim, its initial spin rate would have been so fast that the earth would have been a different shape. Therefore it is not billions, only thousands of years old.”

  “Wow, that was good!” Cohen’s boyfriend, Adam Lobel, said. “Very good. Now how about this? It’s absolutely improbable for life forms, as complex as they are, to develop by chance. It’s like saying that a tornado could rip through a junkyard and create an Alfa Romeo or a Boeing 777. Improbable? No, impossible. There’s intelligent design to it all. There’s a creator.”

  It was the first mention of a higher force by anyone in the group. It was followed by complete silence.

  McCauley let the quiet settle in. Then he spoke just above a whisper.

  “We’re not going to change people’s minds. Young Earthers base their evidence on their own set of facts and their faith. They maintain that since evolutionary phenomena can’t be observed in motion, they doesn’t exist. That since evolution doesn’t explain things like the Big Bang, it is therefore false. That scientists disagree on its veracity. And most importantly, new species do suddenly appear through intelligent design. They claim we are evidence of that.

  “Certainly many of the arguments are deeply held, unshakable beliefs by everyday people, your own clergy, dedicated fathers and mothers, teachers, police officers, librarians, computer experts, perhaps members of your families.”

  This brought some nods.

  “They’re also propagandized and exploited for political and financial reasons by those in government and media personalities who preach through their own commercial pulpits. The views become valuable political capital for lobbyists and corporations. So, we must work hard to patiently separate argument from beliefs.”

  “That’s impossible,” Jaffe complained.

  “Your impossibility is someone else’s faith.”

  “And their faith negates the possible. X is the age of the earth and they claim that A is evidence of it.”

  “Basically.”

  “Then conversely, not A is evidence against their X. But they won’t consider that,” he added.

  “No they don’t because they don’t believe it,” McCauley offered. “Belief is different from consideration. They hold intelligent design near and dear. So while you may chalk up Young Earthers’ arguments to pseudo-science, absurd ‘uniformitarianism,’ unsupported assumptions, false dilemmas, affirmin
g a consequence or invoking miraculous violations of physics, you cannot sway basic religious belief. We can refute them and challenge data mining, but when it comes down to fundamental convictions, we’ll have no more luck turning them around than they will us.”

  “So what’s the point of what we do, Dr. McCauley?” Leslie Cohen seemed to speak for her colleagues. “What’s the chance of making a significant new find? Who’s to say there is anything new to discover, that there’s nothing remarkable right here?”

  Quinn McCauley smiled. Leslie Cohen had just stepped into what he liked to describe as intellectual quicksand.

  McCauley paced, which made it look like he was thinking. But he knew exactly what to say. He didn’t want to embarrass her. That could humiliate the young woman and destroy the team building that was so important for the full summer experience.

  “All fair questions, Leslie,” he finally said. “But how about if I flip it around. What if we’re all standing atop something remarkable? Groundbreaking? Astounding? Right here. This very spot.” He pointed straight down. “But we’re exploring over there a thousand feet away.”

  “Bad luck,” Leslie replied, taking McCauley’s bait.

  “There’s an expression.”

  “I’m sure there is,” Jaffe called out.

  “Really. It’s been used and misused by a wide variety of people—for laying down scientific theories and for strictly political reasons. You can find examples from astronomer Carl Sagan to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and a slew of others. Anyone?” He waited a few seconds before picking up the point. “That’s okay. I’m happy to share it. It’s simple. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

  McCauley saw recognition on some of the faces. Others were working through the circular phrasing.

  “I know. It’s hard on the ear. Let me give it to you again. The absence of evidence,” he paused, “is not evidence of absence.”

  Now it registered across the board.

  “Someone want to take a stab at it?”

  Carlos Rodriguez raised his hand. “Mathematically, if you look for X, but don’t find it, it doesn’t mean X doesn’t exist.”

  “Excellent. Now practical examples.”

  Chohany spoke up next. “Rumsfeld was making the case that just because the U.N. didn’t find WMD in Iraq it didn’t rule out the possibility that they had them.”

  McCauley nodded approvingly and saw that Rich Tamburro had another idea.

  “Take life like us on other planets. We haven’t found any yet, but that can’t suggest that we won’t ever. I suppose that was Sagan’s argument.”

  It was going well. Now to see if the young woman who proposed the question was following the line of thinking. “Ms. Cohen?” he asked.

  “Dinosaurs,” she admitted. “New species, new genus. We won’t know until we find them.”

  “Very good,” McCauley said. “There is an actual probability theory in support of the proposition. If I had the whiteboard up, it would be easier. So, consider yourself spared from classroom pedagogy.”

  McCauley heard an “amen” and “thank goodness.”

  “Just trust me,” he continued, “it weighs probability against events in the favor of evidence. In our realm, Young Earthers and creationists might assert that the lack of some fossils disprove evolution. But specific proof may be missing because fossilization is not a democratic process. It has not occurred with every specimen or species.”

  McCauley stopped again and let the thought truly sink in.

  “Remember,” he continued, “there’s still so much to learn about our planet. Just a few years ago, the world’s longest canyon was discovered below two miles of ice in Greenland. It’s been there for some four million years but invisible until ice-penetrating radar hit it during airplane flyovers. It’s still buried under two miles of ice, but we now know it’s twice as long and twice as wide as the Grand Canyon even though it can’t be explored.”

  “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” Cohen said.

  “Absolutely,” McCauley proclaimed. His lesson had penetrated. “And since we’re here to dig for evidence, I think it’s time to call it a night. We start tomorrow.”

  • • •

  McCauley was looking over the last embers of the campfire when he heard footsteps and someone call his name.

  “Dr. McCauley?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Hi, I’m Jim Kaplan. I look over this place.”

  “Mr. Kaplan, great to meet you. I’ve heard all about you. Thanks for coming by.”

  “We’re going to get along famously if you call me by the name my golfing buddies do. It’s Kappy.”

  This made the Yale professor very happy. “Kappy it is. And I’m Quinn.”

  “Like ‘The Mighty Quinn?’”

  “Not so mighty, and certainly not an Eskimo, but you know your music.”

  “Manfred Mann. 1968.” Kappy laughed. “It comes from years listening to Cousin Brucie on SiriusXM.”

  “We’re definitely going to get along, Kappy. How about saying hello to my team, then we can knock down a scotch in my tent.”

  • • •

  That night they talked dinosaurs and music. Kappy gave McCauley a primer on the park. The teacher had read much of it, but hearing about the geological history from someone filled with such passion reinforced McCauley’s decision to come to Makoshika.

  “We’re the largest state park in Montana. More than 11,500 acres. I challenge you to find a better ancient burial ground. They call it badlands. I think we should be promoting the park as the world’s great lands.”

  “I like the ring of that,” McCauley said. He offered up his half-filled plastic cup with a wonderful twelve-year-old Glenlivet Scotch. Kappy met his toast. They laughed at the dull thud the cups made.

  “Did you know there are a number of stories about the origin of the toast?” McCauley asked.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. The first is owed to the Greek gods. As they drank their wine or other fermented delights they could appreciate the brilliant color by holding it up to a candle or the sun, which they controlled. They could take in the most pleasing of aromas. The could touch the velvety liquid and they could savor the flavors as they drank to their hearts’ content. But there was nothing for the ear, so… .”

  “Ping!” Kappy concluded. “They clinked their glasses.”

  “So the mythology goes.”

  “The other story?”

  “Well, from Greece to Rome. The priests also enjoyed their libations. But it was not always considered in the best of form. So, they created a good reason to justify their more serious drinking. They told parishioners that by bringing their glasses together and creating the distinctive, high-pitched musical tone, the devil would be chased away. What better justification to get drunk than to scare off the devil?”

  “Gotta love it. Yes, seems the Church has always been able to invent parables to explain away a great deal of things.”

  “I suppose that’s what makes history so interesting,” McCauley said. He spoke from his comfort zone. His undergraduate degree was history with an emphasis on the world since 1914. Ironically, paleontology—even earlier history—came to him later.

  “I like to believe it also makes for more enlightenment, not less. Out here, it’s Native American culture that leads to a certain open-mindedness,” Kappy commented. “You’ll hear your fair share of stories the more time you spend in the badlands. They had a way of seeing and interpreting things spiritually and quite naturally.”

  “What would you recommend?”

  “Look up, look down, look everywhere. You’re going to want to take your team along Kinney Coulee Trail, about four miles south of the entrance. The terrain’s rougher than the basic loops, but the rock formations are amazing. You’ve been to Bryce Canyon?”

  “Sure have.”

  “Well, we’ve got examples of similar windblown formations in isolation: sculptured sp
iral statues painted in earth’s most lively colors. Positively beautiful.”

  “There’s a half-mile loop off the Cap Rock Nature Trail. The walk is one of my favorites. It begins on Cains Coulee Road. You’ll catch great views of our natural rock bridge. The formation still astounds me. Also, take Diane Gabriel Trail up the line a bit. It loops through a prairie section. About midway you’ll see a duck-billed dinosaur fossil embedded in a cliff. It’s a real crowd pleaser.”

  “I’ve seen pictures,” McCauley replied.

  “Nothing compared to the real thing. But all you’ll really need to do is stand anywhere in the park and turn 360. The topography changes everywhere you look. Microclimates and ancient water sources have carved out the most unbelievable landscapes, a feast for artists’ and photographers’ eyes. Pure gold for us. You’ll feel a solitude that’s indescribable.”

  “The Lakota used to put their ears to the ground, listening for the footsteps of their direct ancestors and even those who came before them. It’s all legend, of course, but who’s to really say? There’s so much we don’t understand.”

  “That’s why we’ve come to your backyard, Kappy.” He raised his cup for another thud. “We’re going to a have a great time and you’re welcome to join us whenever you’d like. But let’s get something equally important on the books.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve come equipped and we need to set a date.”

  He walked to the end of his tent and lifted a black tarp that had covered a shipping skid. In addition to backpacks, canned food, digging tools and rain gear, Kappy saw McCauley’s prize possession: his Callaway golf clubs, bought used on eBay.

  “When do we play?” he asked.

  Fifteen

  Makoshika State Park, MT

  Three weeks into the dig

  The simple truth was that the process hadn’t changed since the time of Cope and Marsh or even years earlier. You had to dig. The treasures were usually lower. Exhaustingly lower. Depressingly lower. Sometimes unforgivably lower. And, as McCauley had pointed out, no matter how far you dug, you had to be in the right place. Modern equipment made some searching easier, but luck still played a heavy hand.