Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
al starts sloughing off the top and sides of a pile of sand if a bulldozer keeps advancing into
it.
But if you didn't know about plate tectonics, how could you explain finding an old ocean
floor on top of the planet's highest peak? People around the world faced a similar ques-
tion when they saw marine fossils entombed in high mountains. One way to resolve such
puzzles is to assume that mountains don't rise and that an incredibly deep sea once covered
the peak, and thus the whole world. Another way is to assume that the rocks now exposed
in the mountain somehow rose miles up out of the sea. Imagining that Noah's Flood sub-
merged the Himalaya is no less intuitive than the modern scientific idea that India is slam-
ming into Asia and bulldozing up the world's highest mountains in a process so slow one
could not observe its progress over many lifetimes.
If you think the world is static, the idea of deforming and deconstructing rocks into whole
new formations would never cross your mind. Before the concept of geologic time entered
into people's thinking, it was crazy to imagine that India was pushing up an old seabed
to form the Himalaya. Faced with the choice between a catastrophic flood or mysteriously
rising mountains, early natural philosophers considered a mammoth flood less preposter-
ous.
Naturally, arguments erupted about how to interpret and reconcile religious beliefs with
discoveries about nature, and vice versa. How could they not? Humanity's essential curi-
osity and propensity to talk promote debate. Was Genesis intended as a concise history of
the Jewish people, a literal and comprehensive history of the world, or as metaphorical par-
ables for ages to come? The modern creationist concept of fundamental conflict between
faith and reason would have shocked early Christians who believed that discoveries about
the world revealed natural truths that could only support biblical truths.
Noah's Flood was a powerful narrative that greatly affected the early development of
geology because natural philosophers initially looked to the biblical flood to explain rocks,
topography, and whole landscapes. How could the shells of sea creatures come to rest in-
side mountains? Discoveries of marine fossils found far above the sea bolstered the view of
Noah's Flood as a global catastrophe. The idea that the world had been reshaped by a great
flood doubled as biblical truth and the first geological theory for much of postclassical an-
tiquity.
