Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
In the early 1970s, as plate tectonics was revolutionizing the earth sciences, James
Moore, a lecturer in history of science and technology at England's Open University, em-
phasized the ongoing threat dogmatic theology posed to evangelical thought in the Evan-
gelical Quarterly .
Scientists and theologians who are Christians too often neglect history to their own intellectual condemnation.
What appear to them to be major modern issues on which turns the perspicuous truth of biblical revelation are
often problems which were long ago laid to rest. They realize too late that their labored polemics and hastily writ-
ten tracts are little more than exuberant rehashes of what was once conclusively argued or contravened. This is
unforgivable. They should have known that, without historical sense, it is not only possible but inevitable that men
repeat the very errors which once discredited their forbearers. 9
Like their seventeenth-century predecessors, the imagination of modern creationists
knows no bounds. The impressive variety of explanations they invoke for substantiating
literal interpretations of Noah's Flood as a global catastrophe include collapse of a globe-
shrouding vapor canopy, eruption of supergeysers from the earth's core, and bombardment
by asteroids striking the world's oceans. Apparently, a literal reading of the Bible still
leaves a lot of room for creative interpretation.
Rocks, on the other hand, do not. When a colleague and I were leaving the Creation
Museum, he pointed out the 440-million-year-old, trilobite-bearing limestone exposed in
a road cut. This ancient seabed from the proto-Atlantic Ocean is exposed for hundreds of
miles across Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. These rocks are clearly not a chaotic, mixed-
up product of an earth-shattering flood. They formed when an ancient sea gradually accu-
mulated, layer by layer, to form a thick pile of sediment stretching from Newfoundland to
Alabama. What better testimony could be offered to the irreconcilable differences between
geology and creationism than the fact that the Creation Museum itself is built upon rocks
that dispute the version of earth history displayed within its walls?
But without a theoretical framework for interpreting their observations, geologists can
misread the stories inscribed in the rock record. Only when the idea of plate tectonics came
to light was there a clear driving mechanism to explain the global distribution of topo-
graphy and rock types. The difference between scientists and creationists, however, is that
scientists assess their theories based on how well they fit the evidence, whereas creation-
Search WWH ::




Custom Search