Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
ationists invoked to explain the fossil record could not survive the flood they called upon
to generate it.
One of the simplest arguments against a young age for the world's sedimentary rocks
was the amount of water that would need to be evaporated in order to account for the great
thickness of evaporites, like the gypsum (calcium sulfate) deposits in Michigan and west
Texas. Since less than a foot of gypsum would precipitate out of a thousand feet of seawa-
ter, Kulp calculated that it would take evaporation of an ocean 450 miles deep to build up
the thick gypsum deposits of west Texas. Based on the most extreme recorded evaporation
rates from the Dead Sea, he calculated this would take hundreds of thousands of years. The
world's thick evaporite beds could not have formed in the single year of Noah's Flood.
Evidence based on completely different approaches—radioactive decay, the amount of
salt in the sea, and even the relationship between the speed of light and the distance to the
stars—all indicated that Earth was millions if not billions of years old.
Kulp concluded his critique of Price's ideas by warning that pushing demonstrably false
ideas would hinder the spread of the Gospel among educated people. An evangelical him-
self, Kulp studied chemistry until he felt the Lord call him to study geology. He was con-
cerned that for half a century too few evangelical Christians had entered the field of geo-
logy; consequently, Price and his disciples exercised too much influence in evangelical
circles, given their lack of geological knowledge.
Few mainstream Christian scholars bought into Price's flood geology. In 1954, influen-
tial Baptist theologian Bernard Ramm critiqued creationism from an evangelical perspect-
ive in
The Christian View of Science and Scripture
. Ramm argued against a recent global
flood. He considered it ludicrous to think that people from all the world's ethnicities could
have descended from Noah in just a few thousand years.
Ramm contrasted two traditions through which Christians approached science. Those ad-
opting the “ignoble tradition” had taken a hostile attitude toward science and “used argu-
ments and procedures not in the better traditions of established scholarship,” whereas those
following the “noble tradition” had “taken great care to learn the facts of science and Scrip-
of Nature and of Scripture are the same God, then the two topics of God must eventually
