Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
The land beneath our feet is active, changing, and moving—every day, somewhere. We
simply cannot afford to ignore what we learn from geology. We use it to find oil, site and
design buildings, map floodplains, and assess mineral deposits. Science is useful because it
explains how the world works. This is why we place faith in it.
The history of thinking about catastrophic floods certainly features its share of conflict.
Yet amid the conflict I found fertile cross-pollination between geology and Christianity.
Scientific discoveries shaped creative explanations for earth history, and the interpretation
of biblical stories of the Creation and Noah's Flood framed the ideas of early geologists.
The challenge of adapting biblical interpretations to accommodate geological discoveries
helped shape modern Christianity, influencing both liberal and conservative thought.
Let me take you on a journey through the story of how geologists learned to read the
history of the world in the rocks beneath their feet and the hills above their heads. Instead
of the familiar tale of controversy over Darwin's ideas, we'll see how geological discov-
eries helped trigger a different story of evolution—that of Christian theology and the birth
of modern creationism. Along the way we'll explore how one of humanity's fundamental
traits—observing the natural and physical world around us—led to stories about unimagin-
able floods. You see, the stories of Noah's Flood and the Tibetan flood are much the same,
except of course that one went viral and we're still arguing about it. We'll also see how
creationists came to consider reason in general, and geology in particular, as the enemy
of faith, so much so that they could not bring themselves to accept scientific findings that
seemed to corroborate biblical stories. So, like Alice heading down the rabbit hole, let's
start at the beginning.
For a geologist, the logical place to begin is in the oldest rocks buried at the bottom of
the geologic record. I know of no better place to see how a geologist reads a story of rocks,
topography, and time than the Grand Canyon. This stunning landscape tells a tale stretch-
ing back into deep time over an unimaginably vast expanse of earth history. Armed with a
few commonsense rules to guide reading the rock record, one finds in the canyon a story
of whole worlds come and gone long before the one we know. The story is laid out plain as
day in the walls of the deepest hole in North America.
