Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Even if Noah's Flood had drowned the world, Leonardo did not see how it could have
carved topography. If it rained enough to submerge the highest peaks, the floodwaters
would have formed a great sphere. But were water to everywhere rise to the same elevation,
it would have no slope to propel it. How could the floodwaters erode valleys without mov-
ing? Besides, where did all that water go afterward? For a mind such as Leonardo's, more
looking and thinking only spawned more questions.
Getting rid of the floodwaters presented as great a challenge as generating a global flood.
Evaporating a globe-covering mass of water would require more heat than the Sun could
muster. And not only were shells heavy enough to settle out in turbulent water, but the wa-
ter at the bottom of a wave moves away from shore. Noah's Flood would have dragged
fossils out to sea rather than pushed them up onto mountains. To Leonardo, fossil shells
entombed in upland rocks, the conventional evidence for a global flood, amounted to no
evidence at all.
Later, exploration of the New World would raise new problems for a global flood. Par-
ticularly troublesome was the huge increase in the number of species Noah had to house on
his ark as explorers discovered the world's great variety of life-forms. As confounding as
how all of these new animals could have fit aboard was the question of how they traveled
to the ark before the flood and then back home again afterward, all without leaving any
offspring in the Old World.
Unlike Leonardo, who stuck close to home, everywhere European explorers went they
found people who didn't appear to be descended from a Jewish patriarch. Biblical apolo-
gists proposed that Native Americans descended from the lost tribes of Israel, from Vik-
ing expeditions, or from people who had crossed ancient land bridges to the New World.
Such solutions introduced even more problems. Where were these continent-connecting
land bridges now? Could Pygmies, Vikings, and Aborigines all have descended from Noah
in just a few thousand years, when classical statues revealed that Greeks and Italians looked
the same two thousand years ago as they do today? If people changed so slowly, how could
the kaleidoscope of the world's ethnicities have developed since Noah's Flood? However
one looked at it, the biblical account provided an incomplete view of earth history.
The discussion changed with the arrival of Protestant thought. The reformers who split
the church broke with the centuries-long Catholic tradition of allegorical interpretation but
