Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
There was no shortage of subsequent fantasylike theories of the Flood, including one
from astronomer Edmund Halley involving his namesake Halley's comet. When his pre-
dicted return of a comet to European skies came true in September 1682, the popularity
of comets surged among both the general public and natural philosophers. Two years later,
Halley read a pair of papers to the Royal Society in which he argued that in dictating Gen-
esis to Moses, God left out most of earth history. Fossils found far above the sea convinced
Halley, like many before him, that the biblical flood was indeed global. Noting that God
used natural means to carry out His will, and that forty days and nights of rain could not
possibly submerge the highest mountains, Halley proposed that the shock from a comet
passing close by Earth knocked the world off its axis, sending the oceans sloshing back
and forth across the continents. The resulting devastation heaved the seafloor up into great
piles, forming mountains and carving the topography we know today.
Even if the forty inches of rain that typically fell in a year in England's wettest counties
instead fell each day for forty days and nights, it would only inundate coastal lowlands. So
Halley drummed up another source in an act of God. A great vapor canopy God had origin-
ally placed above the firmament to enshroud the primordial Earth collapsed and dropped
enough water to account for Noah's Flood. Three centuries later the founders of modern
creationism resurrected this highly imaginative idea as their own vapor canopy theory.
Halley's second paper presented far more radical ideas. Maybe the comet hit more than
four thousand years ago. Maybe such global calamities occurred many times in the past,
and might even recur in the future. Periodic catastrophes might even be necessary to re-
fresh Earth's surface once soils eroded and could no longer support life. He admitted to
struggling with the theological implications of a world designed to require periodic de-
struction, and was terrified of what the church might think of his views. Less brave than
Galileo, Halley refused to publish his papers and instead deposited them in the Royal Soci-
ety's archives, with the proviso that they be published after his death.
Two years after Halley's address, in 1696, one of those in attendance, William Whiston,
a Newton protégé and chaplain to the Bishop of Norwich, borrowed Halley's comet for
A
New Theory of the Earth
. A combination of Newtonian physics, biblical interpretation, and
occasional facts, Whiston's topic also described the planet being knocked off its axis as it
passed through the tail of a great comet. Whiston spun another tale from that point. Torren-
