The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood

David R. Montgomery “The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood”  Norton & Co., 2012, 257 pp.

Author David Montgomery teaches geomorphology at the University of Washington.  I was particularly surprised that the study of geology in the West was so profoundly controlled by the bible and the confines imposed by the story of a world-wide flood, commonly labeled “Noah’s flood”.  Montgomery investigates the various flood-stories of cultures across the world as well as how the current premises of geology evolved.  This is an excellent history of geology.

My Notes:

 Pg. 38:  Augustine’s contemporary, Saint Jerome (347-420AD), translated the Bible into Latin and institutionalized allegorical interpretations.  Jerome also extolled the virtues of thoughtful reasoning in understanding scripture.  Holding Earth’s disrupted, broken, and twisted crust as evidence of God’s wrath, he considered literal interpretation of the Bible as shallow reasoning.  Jerome cemented within the church a tradition of considering literal interpretations for the illiterate masses and allegory for more advanced minds—that is, the clergy…Eventually, the tide shifted when Martin Luther led the sixteenth-century Protestant rebellion against an elite, allegorically minded priesthood, reclaiming the banner of biblical interpretation for the more literal-minded.

Pg. 48:  Galileo (1564- 1642) defended Copernican theory by arguing that Moses adapted his language to his audience.  It was this interpreting of scripture that got him into trouble.  The Council of Trent (1545-1563) had forbidden interpretations of the bible that contradicted the traditional commonsense views of the church fathers.  And an Earth-centered universe was enshrined in Catholic tradition.  (In 1992 the Pope apologized for the treatment of Galileo)

Pg. 79:  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.  There was, at the time, no way to date how old fossils were, no way to date when they had lived or died.  The simplest answer was that they had died all at once in Noah’s flood.

Pg. 90:  We now know of at least five mass extinctions in the geological past, and biologists say another one is under way as we wipe species off the planet 100 to 1,000 times faster than nature did before we started helping out…The dinosaurs died off and mammals began rising 65 million years ago.  The less well-known, but far deadlier, extinction event 352 million years ago killed off almost all of the animal species on Earth, ending the age of trilobites and setting up the rise of dinosaurs.  More recently, the last glaciation (the so-called ice age of the past several million years) saw the demise of mega-fauna, like mammoths, and ushered in a modern world increasingly dominated by people. 

Pg. 122:  In the opening decades of the nineteenth-century, even Pope Pius VII endorsed viewing the six days of Creation as of indeterminate length.  By 1876 it was accepted that Noah’s flood had been a local affair rooted in an historical Mesopotamian flood rather than a global disaster (p.150).

Pg. 212:  We now know that large ice dam failures were common in pre-historic North America and Eurasia.  In North America, glacial dam failures were not restricted to the Pacific Northwest.  Catastrophic drainage of glacial Lake Agassiz, a vast lake that formed in a moat like depression of the edge of the retreating Canadian ice sheet, happened numerous times as the lake’s shoreline kept shifting as the ice melted off.  The floods cascaded off in different directions, south to the Mississippi, north through Hudson’s Bay, and east down the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic.  The lake emptied for the last time more than eight thousand years ago.  Humans were around to witness this last flood as recent discovery of human coprolites (fossilized excrement) radio-carbon dates to 14,000 years ago at Paisley Caves in southern Oregon.  (This could account for various flood stories present in Indian folklore.)

Pg. 243:  Plate tectonics revolutionized geology, elegantly explaining within a single framework many of the physical world’s outstanding mysteries.  For instance, it explains why Africa and South America look like they fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, only separated by the Atlantic Ocean.  It explains the sequences, ages, and assemblages of rocks one finds throughout the world, as well as the global distribution of topography.

Pg. 248:  Perhaps the conventional view of the centuries-long conflict between geology and Christianity should be viewed as more of a coevolutionary process.  As geological interpretations of earth history evolved away from and evidence mounted against a single worldwide deluge (Noah’s flood), Christians responded in three ways: some abandoned the Bible as an authoritative text; some tried to reconcile biblical and scientific views; and others simply rejected evidence they perceived to threaten biblical authority.  These approaches correspond, respectively, to secular modernism, mainstream Christianity, and reactionary fundamentalism.

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.  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.

Pg. 256:  Miracles do not fuel curiosity or innovation.  If we embrace the claim that Earth is a few thousand years old, we must also throw out the most basic findings of geology, physics, chemistry, ad biology.  The concept of geologic time, on the other hand, opens up an entirely new creation story, along with the idea that the world is unfinished and creation is ongoing.  While science has much to offer us, from vaccines to space travel, religion can help humanity frame essential social, moral, and ethical decisions, such as those arising from the development and uses of science and technology.  Of course, history is also replete with examples of religion being used to subjugate, control, and persecute.  Ethics and morality do not require a religious basis any more than vociferous professions of religious belief guarantee ethical or moral behavior.  Faith and reason offer different lenses through which people seek to understand the world and our place in it.