Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
rock standing above ocean basins and lowlands. Mountains were the collapsed ruins of
Earth's original crust.
Not everyone was convinced the flood was global. Kircher's contemporary Isaac Vossi-
us, Dutch theologian and librarian to the Queen of Sweden, argued for a local flood on the
grounds that there simply was not enough water on Earth to submerge the highest moun-
tains. He dismissed as pious fooleries proposals that God miraculously created extra water
and then just as miraculously made it all disappear. Vossius argued that the few generations
between Adam and the Flood could hardly have populated Mesopotamia, let alone the en-
tire planet. Instead, he proposed that people must have occupied a limited area in Noah's
time because it was senseless for God to punish uninhabited places. Besides, the ancients
often used universal terms to describe local events. The Flood need only have been uni-
versal in the sense that it overwhelmed humanity's ancestral homeland. In his reading, the
Bible revealed Noah's Flood to have been a local affair.
The amount of water required to flood the world also was a sticking point for Edward
Stillingfleet, the Anglican Bishop of Worcester, who in 1666 wrote
Origines Sacrae
(
Sacred Origins
). He too considered a local flood consistent with biblical orthodoxy. Ac-
cording to his calculations, the world's clouds could only produce enough water to cover
the globe with a foot and a half of water—nowhere near enough to submerge the whole
planet. Stillingfleet echoed Vossius in thinking that a regional flood could have destroyed
mankind if humanity was restricted to the Middle East. A flood that affected a small part of
the world would also mean that Noah only needed to load representatives of part of the an-
imal kingdom on his ark. Stillingfleet did not favor invoking additional miracles not men-
tioned in scripture to explain a worldwide flood, or the logistical challenge of feeding a
boatload of animals when all the world's edible plants lay submerged beneath the waves.
Stillingfleet and Vossius helped establish the legitimacy of belief in a local flood among
theologians, but the propensity to interpret Noah's Flood as a global deluge did not fade
easily. Prominent seventeenth-century natural philosophers continued to use Noah's Flood
to explain geological observations, among them the grandfather of geology.
The Dane Niels Stensen, better known as Steno, was the son of a successful Copenhagen
goldsmith. Born into a Lutheran family on New Year's Day in 1638, Steno was taught that
at most the world would last another couple of centuries before God ended everything.
