Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
itational pull of a passing comet would not deform a subterranean abyss, thereby burying
yet another idea attempting to explain Noah's Flood.
Curiously, Keill the astronomer was a deeply religious natural philosopher not inclined to
rationally explain the miraculous
.
He was comfortable with the Flood's being an event not
amenable to scientific explanation. While the astronomer Keill preferred to invoke miracles
to explain earth history, the cleric Burnet sought to demonstrate that it happened through
natural processes.
Today, long after such fundamental ironies have been forgotten, seventeenth-century
ideas still frame the essential arguments that creationists offer to reconcile geological evid-
ence with their presumed reality of a global deluge. The key difference, of course, is that
seventeenth-century philosophers did not blindly trust particular literal interpretations of
scripture. They had faith reason would lead to enlightened interpretation of God's creation,
as read from the pages of the topic of nature—the rocks themselves.
As natural philosophers began to better understand the universe and its workings, atti-
tudes toward mountains underwent radical change. Long seen as ugly, inconvenient, and
dangerous, the Alps became Europe's prime tourist attraction by the end of the eighteenth
century. At the same time, theologians gradually came to see mountains as beautiful nat-
ural cathedrals—spiritually uplifting examples of the magnificence of creation rather than
evidence of a ruined world, the broken remnants of a wrecked paradise.
Geologists today tend to forget that the foundation of modern geology, Steno's decept-
ively simple idea that younger rocks lay on top of older ones, was introduced to help ex-
plain how Noah's Flood shaped the Italian landscape. Yet Steno's story remains one of the
best examples of the complex interplay between geology and theology, setting off and set-
ting up debates that continue to this day. Although Steno's greatest insight was that the
present arrangement of the layers that make up our world can be used to read its history,
his greatest impact was on shaping the views of generations of students he never met. The
more natural philosophers applied Steno's rules to the geologic record, the more they dis-
covered about how the rocks revealed a much longer story than the traditional biblically
inspired history of the world.
