Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Christianity—between science and religion—was too simplistic. The real story was far
more interesting.
My curiosity about a geological basis for the biblical flood began in the 1990s, when
Bill Ryan and Walter Pitman, two prominent oceanographers, suggested that the Mediter-
ranean Sea catastrophically spilled over into a low-lying lake valley to create the Black Sea.
When they proposed that this was in fact Noah's Flood, many Christians were intrigued
by scientific support for the biblical story. Creationists were outraged. Why were creation-
ists angry when scientists claimed to find support for the biblical flood? The problem to
them was that this flood was not an earth-shattering, topography-busting flood that ripped
apart and reassembled the whole world. It was not the flood that they thought the Bible
described. They saw the suggestion that Noah's Flood was a regional disaster, and not a
global event, as an attack on Christianity. For completely different reasons, many geolo-
gists also were immediately skeptical—hadn't science dispelled Noah's Flood as an ancient
myth?
I thought Ryan and Pitman's idea made sense. It was geologically plausible. Had they
solved the puzzle of Noah's Flood?
No other story has had as profound an influence on geology as that of Noah's Flood.
Today almost half of the American public believes in young Earth creationism—that the
world is about six thousand years old and that Noah's Flood reshaped Earth's surface
into today's world a few thousand years before the time of Christ. 2 While there is no
doubt that the world is far older than creationists allow, it is this most fundamental fea-
ture—time—eons of it, that causes creationists to so vociferously deny modern geology.
Why this reaction? Because if the world is old, it allows time not only for mountains to rise
and erode but, more problematically, for evolution to work. In defending an interpretation
of God's word contradicted by geological evidence, creationists abandon a long-standing
Christian belief that rocks don't lie.
For centuries, Christians interpreted scientific discoveries through faith that God's word
(the Bible) and Creation (nature) must be consistent with one another. In combing through
historical material—both geological and theological—I saw that previous generations had
reconciled geological evidence with how to read the biblical story of Noah's Flood. Al-
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