Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
lion years of earth history is about the same number of sentences on a typical front page of
the
New York Times
. One can hardly expect a detailed accounting given that this represents
just a couple of dozen sentences per billion years, and that most of these sentences deal
with the life and times of Adam, Noah, and company.
One might think that brevity equates with clarity in a simple literal reading of Genesis.
But God created light on the first day and didn't make the Sun until the fourth day. So
where did the light and the night come from, and how was the length of the first three days
defined? Fish were not even created at all in a literal reading of Genesis, for they are not
mentioned. Neither are bacteria, viruses, and insects—or dinosaurs. Does this mean that
they evolved after the initial Creation, or that Genesis is not a comprehensive world his-
tory? Such questions and the potential for alternative interpretations gave rise to a long his-
tory of commentary on how to interpret Genesis, and how to interpret the story of Noah's
Flood in particular.
Perhaps the challenge of interpreting another famous document—the United States Con-
stitution—can help illuminate the problem of trying to understand the Bible. Consider how
little liberals and conservatives agree on the meaning of the Constitution, a document only
a few thousand words long, written in English not that long ago, whose signed original is
on display under glass for all to see. Compare that with the Bible, which was pieced to-
gether from partial versions of a work three-quarters of a million words long, handed down
between cultures, and translated several times over from a language lacking vowels and
spaces between words. Is it any surprise that people today don't agree on exactly what the
Bible means?
Like most geologists, I had come to see Noah's Flood as a fairy tale—an ancient attempt
to explain the mystery of how marine fossils ended up in rocks high in the mountains. Now
I've come to see the story of Noah's Flood like so many other flood stories—as rooted in
truth. But was it the flooding of the Black Sea, or a great Mesopotamian flood that ravaged
the ancestral homeland of Semitic peoples? Who knows? I doubt the historic truth about
Noah's Flood will ever be known with certainty. And I don't think it really matters. The
discoveries of science have revealed the world and our universe to be far more spectacu-
lar than could have been imagined by Mesopotamian minds. To still see the world through
their eyes is to minimize the wonder of creation.
