The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood

by David R. Montgomery

  Two centuries ago, Christian scholars adapted how they read the Bible to account for geological revelations. And why not? The history of the world that geologists had found in the rocks followed the order of events described in Genesis—an initial period of time without life, followed by the introduction of plants and animals, and eventually people. If the days of Creation referred not to a single week of breakneck change but to a long series of geological ages, the problem that more than six days was needed to account for prehistory became an interpretive detail that did not imperil scriptural authority. Nowhere, Buckland asserted, did Genesis contradict the idea that the modern world was built upon the ruins of prehuman worlds. With one foot in the newborn profession of geology and the other in Anglican orthodoxy, Buckland was a man of deep conviction and few doubts.

  Most geologists love the field aspect of our work, and Buckland appears no different. He went on field excursions across Britain and Europe, accompanying natural philosophers he visited and in the company of those visiting him. He traced the occurrence of durably hard yet smoothly rounded quartzite pebbles in surficial gravels from Oxford north to Warwickshire. There, he found these distinctive pebbles eroding from outcrops of conglomerate, rock formed when gravel and sand were buried deep enough to turn back into solid rock. This unusual formation was known as pudding stone due to the resemblance of the gravel set in a sand matrix to plums in a Christmas pudding. Through his geological sleuthing, Buckland reasoned that the quartzite pebbles had to have been rounded before being incorporated into the conglomerate. He thought that a great flood then ripped the distinctive pebbles back out of the rock, strewing them down the Thames all the way to London.

  Buckland claimed that a great flood provided a better explanation for the distribution of the diluvial gravels than did other ideas—modern rivers were too small to account for regionally extensive gravel sheets or to move the largest boulders found in the deposits. And what at the time seemed like an apparently global distribution of similar deposits was thought to demonstrate that a geologically recent flood had affected the surface of the entire world. Again, Buckland was confident that a great flood provided the best explanation for his geological observations.

  It should come as no surprise, then, that he marveled over what he considered proof of Noah’s Flood when workmen in 1821 discovered a bone-filled cave near Kirkdale in Yorkshire. One of the first to explore the cavern, Buckland stumbled upon a bewildering variety of bones, including those of hyenas, tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotamuses. All these bones were embedded beneath stalactites in the red mud of the cave floor. It was a spectacular discovery indeed.

  How did the bones of so many African species get mixed up together in a British cave? Seeing how some of the bones were gnawed, Buckland concluded hyenas had dragged them into their den long before the Flood, which he thought washed in the cave’s uppermost layer of red mud and more bones. The thin stalactites capping the mud confirmed a recent origin, consistent with Cuvier’s most recent geological catastrophe of five or six thousand years ago.

  Inspired, Buckland gathered geological facts thought to demonstrate the reality of Noah’s Flood into his 1823 Relics of the Flood. In it he described great accumulations of bones in “superficial and almost universal deposits of loam and gravel, which seems impossible to account for unless we ascribe them to a transient deluge, affecting universally, simultaneously, and at no very distant period, the entire surface of our planet.”5 The case for Noah’s Flood appeared to build once again, this time in the interpretation of surficial sediments.

  Buckland combined his description of Kirkdale Cave with a synopsis of similar evidence for a recent deluge from other European caves. The continent’s surficial gravel contained exotic fossils like those from Kirkdale Cave and unlike modern species. Other evidence included giant blocks of granite from Mont Blanc scattered well beyond the Alps. Rejecting a southern origin for the Flood, he argued that Europe’s surficial gravel and stray boulders came from identifiable northerly sources. He also maintained that the violent floodwaters carved valleys far too deep and wide to have been cut by the piddling rivers that flowed through them today.

  In coming to these conclusions, Buckland relied on what he saw with his own eyes. Nowhere did he invoke scriptural authority, even if it framed his view. His reasoning was compelling enough that others hailed his explanation as vindication for the reality of Noah’s Flood. Like Cuvier, he did nothing to discourage the idea. After all, his defense of a global flood had its rewards. Even before his work on Kirkdale Cave, Buckland received the Royal Society’s prestigious Copley Medal. Appointed Canon of Oxford’s Christchurch Cathedral three years later, he eventually became Dean of Westminster, one of the most prestigious positions in the Anglican Church.

  Buckland was hardly alone in thinking he had found evidence of Noah’s Flood. Adam Sedgwick, who held Woodward’s old chair as professor of geology at Cambridge and taught Darwin his geology, summarized conventional thinking in 1825.

  The sacred records tell us—that a few thousand years ago ‘the foundations of the great deep’ were broken up—and that the earth’s surface was submerged by the water of a general deluge… [which] has left traces of its operation in the diluvial detritus which is spread out over all the strata of the world.6

  Not long afterward, cracks began developing in Buckland’s geological case for a global flood.

  The end began when flood skeptics like John Fleming, an evangelical pastor in the Church of Scotland and professor of natural philosophy at Aberdeen, questioned the arguments and conclusions of flood champions like Cuvier and Buckland on theological as well as geological grounds. Fleming’s 1826 article in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal used logic and literal interpretations of scripture to challenge Buckland’s version of the Flood.

  Fleming opened with the problem of how Buckland could attribute extinctions to the Flood when the Bible said that two of every creature boarded the ark. If Noah saved a pair of all the world’s animals, then geologists could not blame extinctions on the Flood. And the biblical flood sounded like a relatively tranquil affair, leaving submerged olive trees intact after taking forty days and nights for the waters to rise. To Fleming, a literal interpretation of the biblical story was inconsistent with Buckland’s view of violent currents capable of carving deep valleys into hard rock and transporting huge boulders and carcasses halfway around the world. Fleming granted that a great flood could have swept away loose soil but doubted that so brief an event could have gouged out deep valleys. To the contrary, a literal reading of Genesis implied that the ark grounded out close to where Noah and his crew first embarked. Surely a flood powerful enough to reshape the world would strand Noah somewhere far from where he started.

  Although Fleming made it clear that he did not question the occurrence of the biblical flood, he viewed the affair as tranquil enough to leave no geological signature. He considered it futile to look for physical evidence of the Flood.

  Fleming also questioned Buckland’s geological interpretations. A global flood would leave the same kind of mud in caves all across Europe. Yet the mud one found varied with the local geology. And if the mud wasn’t washed in from afar, how could the fossils entombed in it have been?

  Fleming’s critique continued with summarily dismissing the theory that the elephantlike bones and carcasses found in Siberia and North America came from tropical regions. The intact skeletons ruled out long-distance transport by a violent deluge. Pointing to Cuvier’s anatomical studies, Fleming argued that the thick hair covering mammoth carcasses showed they were native to cold regions. These behemoths were well suited to living where their bodies were found. Mammoths did not confirm the transporting power of the Flood.

  Fleming even questioned Buckland’s interpretation of Kirkdale Cave. While he agreed that the cave was an ancient hyena den, he thought that Buckland jumped to conclusions in attributing to a single flood the mud in which the bones were found. A succession of sma
ll floods could have deposited the mud.

  Reverend Fleming chided geologists for rushing to find evidence of the biblical flood. In his view, misguided efforts to use geology to vindicate biblical interpretations would harm both science and Christianity.

  More than Fleming’s scathing critique, new geological discoveries eroded Buckland’s faith in a universal deluge. Most problematic for a global flood was that explorers could find no diluvium in the tropics. Closer to home, it proved impossible to explain the complex stratigraphy of European diluvium through a single event, no matter how catastrophic. Buckland began to reconsider whether his imagination had run wild in his zeal to defend the biblical flood. A decade after Fleming first challenged him, Buckland capitulated when he was asked to prepare a volume commissioned by the estate of the Earl of Bridgewater to illustrate how geology revealed the wonder and wisdom of Creation.

  In 1836, Buckland did something few others before him had done in attempts to reconcile geology and the Bible. He pulled a complete about-face when his Bridgewater volume Geology and Mineralogy repudiated his earlier view of diluvium. Instead, he endorsed the position that a tranquil Flood did little to Earth’s surface, long after earlier catastrophes laid down fossil-bearing rocks and surficial deposits. Citing recent discoveries, Buckland advocated caution in trying to use the geological record to support literal interpretations of Genesis.

  The disappointment of those who look for a detailed account of geological phenomena in the Bible, rests on a gratuitous expectation of finding therein historical information, respecting all the operations of the Creator in times and places with which the human race has no concern; . . . the history of geological phenomena… may be fit matter for an encyclopedia of science, but are foreign to… a volume intended only to be a guide of religious belief and moral conduct.7

  Although Buckland still maintained that a geologically recent inundation overwhelmed the northern hemisphere, his earlier confidence that it was the biblical flood lay shattered. He could no longer attribute fossils to Noah’s Flood. Fossils were found in strata that accumulated slowly over long periods of time. Even the surficial deposits recorded more than one event. Buckland had abandoned Noah’s Flood.

  Despite his change of mind, Buckland had no concern that geology and revelation would prove inconsistent.

  Geology has shared the fate of other infant sciences in being for a while considered hostile to revealed religion; but, when fully understood, it will be found a potent and consistent auxiliary to it, exalting our conviction of the Power, and Wisdom, and Goodness of the Creator.8

  Secure as ever in his faith in both nature and the Bible, Buckland maintained that the question is not “the correctness of the Mosaic narrative, but of our interpretation of it.”9 In a philosophical turnabout, Buckland shifted from using geology to shore up a literal interpretation of the Bible to arguing that biblical interpretations could be tested through consistency with geological observations.

  Coming from a conservative man of the cloth, Buckland’s Bridgewater treatise drew immediate attacks from fellow clergy appalled by his recantation of geological support for the biblical flood. Outraged traditionalists who insisted on interpreting the Bible literally railed against this compelling dismissal of scriptural geology by a ranking clergyman steeped in Anglican orthodoxy.

  What led to Buckland’s stunning reversal? To a great degree it was his former spellbound student, Charles Lyell.

  Born into a life of privilege the year James Hutton died, Lyell grew up exploring the New Forest in Hampshire, where his father pursued botanical studies and encouraged his son’s interest in the family’s extensive natural history library. Raised an Anglican, Lyell read Bakewell’s just-published geology textbook in 1816, the year he enrolled at Oxford to study classical literature and law. Lyell was particularly struck by Bakewell’s concept of a world much older than generally supposed based on a literal reading of Genesis. Equally intriguing to him, this unconventional idea came from the pen of someone who believed geology revealed the Creator’s grand design.

  Lyell attended Buckland’s Oxford lectures each spring from 1817 to 1819. He came to accept that the biblical chronology referred to the time since the creation of people. Who could know how much time had passed before then?

  Buckland’s enthusiastic endorsement ensured Lyell membership in the Geological Society of London once he graduated. Society members overwhelmingly rejected Hutton’s view of great cycles of gradual change driven by processes like those operating at present. Most advocated Cuvier’s view of earth history as a series of violent catastrophes. On a visit to Paris the previous year, Lyell examined Cuvier’s collection of fossils, describing them as “glorious relics of a former world.”10

  After graduation, Lyell divided his time between reading for the bar and traveling through Europe. Visiting Paris again in 1823 as a representative of the Geological Society, he met Constant Prévost, a colleague of Cuvier, who believed that the alternating freshwater and marine strata of the Paris basin were deposited gradually in a coastal inlet that periodically turned into a freshwater lake. Perhaps geological change could occur through observable causes, if given enough time.

  The following year, in the fall of 1824, Lyell visited sixty-three-year-old James Hall at his estate on the Scottish coast. Now about the age Hutton was when they first sailed to Siccar Point, Hall took Lyell there to absorb Hutton’s insight through his own eyes. Seeing firsthand how earth history involved a lot more time than conventionally thought, Lyell began to believe that gradual changes could shape the land.

  That same year, Lyell joined Buckland for a geological excursion through Scotland. Although it may have been clear to both that their views had started diverging, neither could have known that within a decade the apprentice would dethrone the master.

  Lyell was not particularly interested in questioning religious views. Like many of his peers, however, he was deeply concerned about the effect that ignoring geological evidence could have on both science and religion. In 1827, he concluded a review of George Poulett Scrope’s Memoir on the Geology of Central France with an appeal for interpreting Genesis broadly and letting the rocks speak for themselves:

  We must recollect that the Mosaic narration is elliptical in the extreme, and that it makes no pretensions whatever to supply those minute scientific details which some would endeavour to extort from it.11

  Lyell was echoing Augustine in believing that it would be hard to convince rational men to follow a religion that denied things one could see for oneself.

  Scrope’s book was the culmination of extensive fieldwork in the Auvergne region, where dozens of conical hills made of loose piles of volcanic cinders overlook acres of black basalt. Deep valleys were carved into stacked lava flows on which these delicate cinder cones stood. Identical sequences of lava flows exposed in the walls on opposing sides of individual valleys proved that the river cut down into the lava. Lyell was intrigued by Scrope’s description of how the lava flows buried the river gravels now exposed in the valley walls. Scrope’s careful observations left no doubt that the lava had repeatedly filled a valley that the river just as often reexcavated. The layers exposed in the cliffs were not deformed and there was no evidence of catastrophic disruption. The valley-filling lava flows could be traced back to loose cinder cones sure to have been swept away by a flood capable of carving into hard rock.

  Lava flows emplaced over buried river gravels in Auvergne, France (based on Charles Lyell’s 1833 Principles of Geology, volume III, figure no. 61, p. 267).

  The following May, Lyell set off to explore the region firsthand, accompanying the influential Scottish geologist Roderick Murchison on an excursion through France. They visited Scrope’s outcrops and studied the relationships between cinder cones, basalt flows, and river terraces. It quickly became clear to Lyell that a single flood could not have carved modern topography. Rivers slowly carved their own valleys.

  From Auvergne, they traveled down the Rhone Va
lley to compare its rocks with those of the Paris Basin. Proceeding south into northern Italy, they traveled from Bologna to Florence and on to the Zoological Museum in Turin. Lyell realized that the rocks in the different parts of the regions they had just crossed had different fossils. Here was a formative realization for one who had never set out to become a geologist.

  Fossils could be used to reliably assess the age of strata in southern Europe, something that could not be determined from mineral composition alone. The fossils in the younger rocks at the top of the regional geological pile were more like the modern fauna than were the fossils in the older rocks deeper in the section. The comings and goings of species from the fossil record could be used to track geologic time. Lyell was hooked. Here was the key to the grandest puzzle. The fossils in different rock formations could be read to tell geologic time. If you knew the mix of fossils in a rock formation, you could confidently deduce its age relative to other formations.

  When Murchison returned to London in August, Lyell traveled on to Sicily, ending his career as a barrister. He was now a geologist, by accident rather than design. More than anything else his exploration of European geology convinced him of the enormous span of geologic time and that a global flood was not responsible for shaping the modern landscape. Perhaps Hutton was right after all. Maybe slow, steady change was the pace at which the world worked.

  On his way back to England, in February 1829, Lyell stopped in Paris to compare the fossils he had picked up with those in the collections of French geologists. The proportion of still-living species increased farther to the south—and higher in the regional stack of rocks. Older rocks, lower down in the regional pile, held more species not represented in the modern fauna. This didn’t square with the traditional biblically inspired view that, except for the Flood, everything’s been the same since the Creation.