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

by David R. Montgomery

  Such evidence did not dissuade the followers of George McCready Price, a prolific, self-taught writer of geology books, despite having no geological education or training. The writings of Ellen Gould White, founding prophetess of Seventh-day Adventism, convinced Price of the validity of flood geology. He rejected the popular day-age and gap theories based on White’s accounts of visions she’d had in which she saw God create the world in six twenty-four-hour days and rest on the seventh. Her trancelike visions revealed that fossils were buried when Noah’s Flood reworked Earth’s surface. Explaining how God removed all the rotting carcasses after the Flood, she told of how a great wind carried “away the tops of mountains like mighty avalanches, forming huge hills and high mountains where there were none to be seen before, and burying the dead bodies with trees, stones, and earth.”1 All that buried vegetation turned into coal, which God occasionally ignited when He wanted to fire up volcanoes. White’s fantasylike explanations sound like the wild ideas of seventeenth-century natural philosophers.

  Born in rural New Brunswick in 1870, Price was a child when his father died and his mother joined the apocalyptically inclined Adventists. Fresh out of high school, he married an older Adventist woman, and together they made their living selling White’s Adventist books door-to-door across Canada. A few years later, in 1891, Price enrolled in Battle Creek College, an Adventist school in Michigan, but fell back to selling books two years later when his money ran out.

  Around the turn of the century, when serving as a high school principal in eastern Canada, Price nearly succumbed to the local physician’s views on evolution after borrowing volumes from his friend’s library. Price concluded that a solid geological foundation would make evolution appear to be reasonable. He came close to accepting that there really must be something to the idea of vast geological ages and worlds lost to the depths of time. But how could he reconcile geologic time with White’s teachings? Guided by prayer, he decided that geologists were fooling themselves. Fossils were really all the same age. Shocked by how he almost yielded to temptation, Price vowed to promote White’s vision of how Noah’s Flood accounted for the fossil record. He had at last found his calling.

  Several years later Price had ample time to ponder how to refute geological theories while working as a handyman at an Adventist sanitarium in southern California. In 1906, his self-published and aptly named Illogical Geology attacked the geological foundations of evolution and claimed there was no proof that any fossil was older than any other. The succession of organisms that geologists found in the rocks was really a mixed-up sampling of communities that lived in different parts of the world before the Flood. What really happened was that a sudden shifting of Earth’s axis had released great subterranean reservoirs and drowned the world. Then a miraculous cosmic storm buried all the drowned bodies and kept the atmosphere from going putrid. Afterwards, the receding waters carved natural wonders like Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon. His geological story reheated Burnet’s and Woodward’s stale theories.

  Price sent copies of his book to eminent geologists seeking their reaction. Among the few who bothered to respond was David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University and an expert on fossil fishes. In a letter to Price, Jordan warned him not to expect geologists to take him seriously because his argument was based on “mistakes, omissions and exceptions” that rendered his case “as convincing [as] if one should take the facts of European history and attempt to show that all the various events were simultaneous.”2 Equally impressed by Price’s obvious intelligence and ignorance of geology, Jordan tried for over two decades to convince him to get some experience in field or laboratory work. Decades later, students on a fossil-hunting trip were astonished to discover that the world’s leading creationist could hardly tell one fossil from another.

  The roots of modern creationism run directly back to Price. Honing arguments faithful to White’s teaching, Price convinced himself that it was the theories of geologists and not the rocks themselves that opposed a literal reading of Genesis. He called his view of geology the new catastrophism to distinguish it from earlier views of earth history involving multiple catastrophes.

  Initially, Price made little headway among fundamentalists and he was careful not to point out the incompatibility of his views with the widely accepted day-age and gap theories. Most fundamentalists committed to scriptural inerrancy followed the conservative Schofield Reference Bible, which endorsed the gap theory in explaining that the original Creation in the first verse of Genesis “refers to the dateless past, and gives scope for all the geological ages.”3 Price was a lonely voice insisting on the literal truth of a global flood that rearranged Earth’s surface and deposited the whole fossil record along with all the world’s sedimentary rocks.

  Geologists ridiculed his ideas mercilessly. Professors routinely assigned graduate students the exercise of refuting them. Writing in Science in 1922, Arthur Miller, the head of the geology department at the University of Kentucky, described Price as an “alleged geologist… who, while a member of no scientific body and absolutely unknown in scientific circles… is hailed by the ‘Fundamentalists’ as their great champion—one who… has brought into prominence the ‘heretofore mute evidence of a mighty upheaval and a flood.’ ”4 Miller was amazed that Price had the audacity to accuse geologists of being biased when Price’s new catastrophism “turns out to be nothing more than the Old Catastrophism embodied in the Noachian Deluge.”5

  When Price read Miller’s disparaging remarks, he fired off an angry letter threatening to sue if not given the chance for a rebuttal. The editor offered to correct any errors of fact but declined to publish Price’s geological views. In response, Price unleashed a furious retort in the Sunday School Times.

  Convinced that a great flood remodeled the entire world, Price called on vast mammoth graveyards as evidence of a sudden calamity, unaware that none had actually been found. He repeated the apocryphal stories of frozen mammoth proving fresh enough for a feast, apparently unaware that firsthand reports contradicted this popular misconception. He also argued that coal deposits and fossil coral found at high latitudes indicated a warmer pre-flood world. He considered this last point particularly persuasive because geologists could not yet explain the fossilized remains of tropical organisms found near the poles.

  Price published The New Geology in 1923, covering standard introductory subjects. Written to look like a textbook, although aimed at the general reader, Price’s book attacked conventional notions of geology. The uninformed reader would see nothing in it to indicate that this did not lay out the essentials of modern geology. Until, that is, one discovered Price’s assertion that geological understanding of a progressive succession of organisms through geologic time was not only flawed, but had been “disproved by a large number of recently discovered facts” that he neglected to mention.6 Instead, he simply asserted that all the animals in the entire fossil record—trilobites, ammonites, dinosaurs, and mammoths—lived together in harmony with people before the Flood.

  Whether ignorant or simply dismissive of centuries of discovery and debate, Price attributed the entire geologic record to Noah’s Flood depositing enormous piles of sediment chock full of fossils. Settling disrupted the pile where the basement strata were unable to support the extra load. Arguing that the folding and tilting of rocks occurred while they were still soft, Price accused mainstream geologists of raw prejudice as he himself never bothered to learn any geology and ignored evidence accumulated by generations of geologists.

  Isolated from contact with geological thinking, fundamentalists looking for arguments to use in their attacks on evolution in the 1920s turned to Price’s flood geology, trusting that it was based on sound science. With no trained geologists among hard-core evangelicals, Price was virtually unchallenged as the sole geological voice in fundamentalist ranks. Offering a message right on target for the war on evolution, Price became a fundamentalist darling. By the mid-1920s he was a regular contributor to
conservative religious periodicals. In short order, although he had no scientific background or training, he became the fundamentalists’ principal scientific authority.

  Fundamentalist beliefs on evolution came to a head in the spring of 1925, when high school teacher John Thomas Scopes confessed to violating a state law against teaching human evolution in Dayton, Tennessee. At his famous trial, defense attorney Clarence Darrow called prosecutor William Jennings Bryan to the witness stand as his final expert on the relation between science and the Bible. Bryan was a well-known politician who jumped at an opportunity to campaign against the moral decay that set in when evolution encouraged people to question biblical authority.

  Darrow grilled Bryan about a host of biblical absurdities. Where did Cain, the murderous son of Adam and Eve, find his wife if his parents were the only other people on Earth? Was Jonah really eaten by a whale and then spit up alive after spending days submerged in the belly of the beast? How could Bishop Ussher’s 4004 BC date for the creation be accurate when Chinese and Egyptian history extend back farther in time? Could Bryan point to any credible scientist who believed that the story of a global flood could be taken literally? In response, Bryan named Price.

  Hearing this, Darrow scoffed, “You mentioned Price because he is the only human being in the world so far as you know that signs his name as a geologist that believes like you do… every scientist in this country knows [he] is… a pretender and not a geologist at all.7” Darrow went on to get Bryan to admit that the days of Genesis 1 were not literal twenty-four-hour days. Each day might have lasted for millions of years. The planet itself might be quite ancient even if people were created just six thousand years ago. Although Bryan reportedly believed in a local rather than a global flood and equated young-Earth creationists with flat Earthers, it did not stop him from using Price’s flood geology to attack evolution.

  At the end of the day, despite Bryan’s joking rejoinders, Darrow had made his point that literalists interpreted the Bible as much as anyone, cherry-picking their way through Scripture. The other defense attorney, Dudley Field Malone, noted that Bryan’s reading was not the only way for Christians to interpret the Bible: it was possible to accept modern science as not being at odds with religious truths.

  The press was not at all kind to Bryan. Neither was fate. He died right after the trial.

  Creationists changed tactics and turned on librarians and teachers, harassing them to keep textbooks that fundamentalists considered objectionable out of classrooms. Creationists who had made front-page headlines in the 1920s were all but forgotten a decade later. Shut out of the popular press, they turned to building their own institutional base, starting their own organizations, journals, and schools. Fundamentalists of this era varied greatly in terms of what to believe about geological ages and the biblical flood. Some, like Price, held to the strict literal interpretation of six days of creation followed by a global flood. Others promoted the gap theory or the idea that each day in the week of creation represented a whole geological age. Leading fundamentalists began to wonder how evangelical Christians could convert the world to their views if they didn’t even agree among themselves.

  Of course, when Price first claimed that all the organisms preserved as fossils died in a sudden catastrophe, there was no way to date their deaths and directly test his claim. Steno’s approach could reveal the relative age of the geological formations containing fossils by determining their order of deposition, but there wasn’t yet any way to directly measure the age of fossil-bearing rocks or fossils themselves.

  Graph showing first test of radiocarbon dating in a plot of known sample age versus the rate of carbon-14 (14C) decay and the close fit between measured values (data points) and values predicted (curve) by radiocarbon decay (based on a figure in Arnold, J. R., and Libby, W. F., 1949, Age determinations by radiocarbon content: Checks with samples of known age, Science, v. 110, p. 678-680).

  The development of radiocarbon dating was revolutionary, as it enabled scientists to reliably date deposits from the last few tens of thousands of years. The method was developed by Willard Libby at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Nuclear Studies and is based on measuring the rate of decay of the naturally occurring unstable radioactive isotope C (carbon-14). Collisions between cosmic ray protons and particles in the atmosphere produce secondary neutrons that are captured by nitrogen nuclei in the N gas that forms most of the atmosphere. This fusion creates C, which decays to the normal stable nitrogen isotope (N) with a characteristic half-life of about 5,720 years, the time it takes for half of the amount remaining to decay. When plants convert atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO) into organic matter during photosynthesis, a small amount of C is incorporated in proportion to the amount in the atmosphere. The atmospheric ratio of C to C is maintained in living things that continually incorporate new carbon into their bodies. But after they die, the C no longer gets refreshed and starts to decay exponentially—at a rate proportional to the amount left. Libby reasoned that if one knew the half-life of C, one could tell how long decay had been going on by measuring the present rate of decay.

  He tested the technique by dating wood from samples with a range of independently known ages. The youngest came from a piece of Douglas fir cut down in 623 AD. Others included the sarcophagus of an Egyptian mummy dating from the third century BC, the inner rings of an almost three-thousand-year-old redwood tree, deck boards from the funerary barge of an Egyptian pharaoh who died around 1843 BC, and wood from a pair of five-thousand-year-old tombs. The ages predicted by radiocarbon dating closely agreed with the known ages of the samples. Radiocarbon dating worked.

  Its application to woolly mammoth carcasses presented a serious problem for champions of flood geology. Carbon dating showed that mammoth carcasses range from more than forty thousand to less than ten thousand years old, disproving the single catastrophe theory. Mammoths did not all die at once.

  How did evangelicals respond to these findings? Many accepted radiometric dating, the idea of an old Earth, and the possibility of a regional flood. But those fundamentalists committed to flood geology and a young Earth responded not with facts or a reinterpretation of scripture; they simply refused to believe it.

  This didn’t solve their mammoth problem. Studies of individual mammoth carcasses revealed that mammoths did not all drown, as they surely would have in a global flood. Some died in the old-elephant death position, down on the stomach with legs stretched out in front. Others sank through the permafrost, fell into collapse pits, or got stuck in swampy ground, unable to extract their bulk from the mire. Mosses, grasses, and herbs found in mammoth stomachs were characteristic of the vegetation growing within a few hundred kilometers of their carcasses. There was no need to invoke a global flood to deliver them from the tropics. Mammoths lived and died close to where their remains were found.

  None of the arguments for asserting that mammoths died in a great catastrophe survived twentieth-century scrutiny. Creationists didn’t seem to notice.

  Concerned over growing antagonism toward science in their community, evangelical Christians formed the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) in 1941 to promote study of the relationship between science and the Bible. One of its key members was J. Laurence Kulp, a PhD chemist from Princeton University who had mastered radiocarbon dating in Libby’s lab at the University of Chicago. He went on to become a leading authority on the method and established his own carbon dating lab at Columbia University. In an article published in 1950 in the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, Kulp attacked flood geology as an embarrassment to both science and Christianity.

  Kulp’s influence helped split the ASA into two camps: old-Earth believers and young-Earth creationists. The former believe that God created the world, but at a geological pace. Bitter disagreements grew into a rift that still characterizes evangelical Christianity today as young-Earth creationists began attacking the idea of an old Earth that allowed time for evolution.

  Kulp not
ed basic creationist errors that he thought reflected a lack of education and training among prominent advocates of flood geology, especially in the important subdisciplines of field mapping, paleontology, and structural geology. Creationists held that geology and evolution were synonymous even though the geological basis for determining the relative age of rocks did not actually rely on fossils. Creationists also claimed that the conditions under which rocks formed and deformed were not well understood. Kulp attributed the confidence of flood geologists to their sincere belief in these fallacious convictions. Finally, he charitably maintained that flood geologists were simply out of date. They relied on Price’s work, which predated the development of radiometric dating, the perforation of Earth’s sedimentary cover by oil wells, and studies that conclusively documented the conditions under which sedimentary rocks form and deform. In other words, so-called flood geologists simply didn’t know what they were talking about.

  In debunking flood geology, Kulp focused on the formation of sedimentary rocks, pointing out how it was impossible for them to have all formed during a single flood. In the 1930s, cores from Venezuelan oil wells documented a complete section showing the compaction and transformation of river mud into hard shale. Penetrating through two vertical miles of muddy sediments, the drill cores revealed that loose mud had to be buried under at least a mile of sediment before it solidified into rock. A mile of water would not do the trick because the additional weight of overlying sediment was needed to squeeze water from the mud. Similar studies documented comparable results for limestone and sandstone. If sedimentary rocks now exposed at the surface all formed during the Flood, then where did the mile of sediment that must have covered them go if there was only a few thousand years to erode it all off?

  Even more damning was Kulp’s discussion of the problem of how to warp layers of sedimentary rock into broad regional folds like those that characterized Appalachian geology. Creationists attributed such deformation to the slumping of Flood-deposited mud and sand, before these layers hardened into rock. Kulp described how this was physically impossible. Shell Oil Company geologists had shown that in order to reproduce geologic conditions in a laboratory setting, one had to scale all the dimensions in the model—including the material properties. Using modeling clay to experimentally investigate the deformation of rocks at temperatures and pressures equivalent to about five to ten miles down within Earth’s crust, one could easily reproduce the folding seen in sedimentary rocks. While turning loose sediment into solid rock required burial to considerable depth, folding rocks required even deeper burial and higher temperatures. Flood geology simply could not explain the world’s great expanses of folded sedimentary rock.