David Montgomery | Noah’s Flood and the Development of Geology || Radcliffe Institute

welcome to rag the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study it's nice to see you wonderful turnout for the deans lecture here so so perhaps remind you or tell you the Radcliffe Institute is primarily a multiple multi disciplinary Institute that knits together the arts humanities sciences and social sciences we have a fellowship program we have a program on science symposia there's a gender conference coming up one gender and violence on April 9th and 10th my name is John Heath so let me introduce our speaker for today David Montgomery he is a professor at the university of washington heads a geomorphology group is also a MacArthur Fellow the author of three books and another book that is forthcoming and we've had I have know somewhat similar interests in kind of the the way science develops and a not so straight and narrow path as sometimes we're taught and so this appeals to me greatly so geomorphology for those of you who don't know is is the study of how the topography of earth's surface is influenced by events like earthquakes and floods and in fact the issue of the flood and the Noah story is a topic of today's story I should mention on a personal note I always like to throw on a personal note is a few years back I was doing a backpacking trip in eastern Washington State and as I was driving to do this backpacking trip we were traveling through the strange landscape and I had no idea what on earth was happening with this landscape because it look weird something I'd never seen before and I was just scratching my head as to what on earth might have created this so about a year and a half ago I read his book the rocks don't lie and in it he has a piece in the chapter about the so called scablands in Eastern Washington where of this Lake about 15,000 years ago Lake masuleh burst forth and and flooded that part of Eastern Washington and created the landscape and all of a sudden I realized that what I was seeing was the result of this giant flood and it's so all the stuff that I didn't know how to interpret came together in one flash of insight and I thought that was just absolutely marvelous so I was delighted with his book and this was one of the motivations for inviting him here because it's cross-disciplinary and it's fascinating topic so without any further ado David welcome to hear you talk about faith in nature I'm a geologist by training has you've just heard and one of the things that I've been asked about by this book you may be wondering is why would a professional geologist in the 21st century write a book about Noah's Flood I hope that about 40 minutes from now you'll sort of see the path that I took in sort of coming to write a book about Noah's Flood and share the sort of the interest in the excitement and the thinking of the history and development of the science of geology something that I wasn't really formally taught in any detail other than what I now knows as a cartoon version but also as I started looking into the history of thought in Christianity the way theology looked at the idea and thought about the flood and the way that this sort of tension between faith and reason has been portrayed in a lot of histories was actually a lot more complicated and interactive and cross pollinating than I ever really knew about so I invite you to sort of share with me the story of how I sort of went through writing this book the rocks don't lie and where it really started was in southeastern Tibet I had no sort of knowledge that I was going to be sort of researching and looking at the effect of really big floods and the origin of flood stories until I got asked to join a scientific expedition to the southeastern Tibet to the gorge at that Tsangpo River I was that the token geomorphologist they need they need a river person on this project and I was the guy that sort of knew some of the people involved they asked me if I wanted to go on this expedition to Tibet I was like sure volunteer no problem but what do I need to do what am i studying and as it so often turns out the thing that we actually proposed to do in zhu morphology was not the thing that i got really excited about after i got there and saw the landscape and started reading pieces of it like this piece that you see behind me this is a topographic terrace it's a lake terrace in the valley of the tanco river upstream of the gorge where the river flows down through the himalaya cars one of the deepest canyons on earth and then flows out to become the Brahmaputra where it gets down into India this is in the eastern corner of the Himalaya where the Tibetan border hits India and remember my Anwar whatever you want to call it and this Valley is a very interesting place these very prominent features are essentially tell me as a geologist that there had been standing water in this lake it's a for the geologist in the audience it's a Gilbert type Delta there's four sets and top set beds but basically the non geologists there was a lake that it reached at least up to about that level at some point in the geological past and we found sort of example after example of these terrorists is going downstream through this valley that I had not really thought were there when we proposed to go study it and I started realizing it hey there was a really big lake that had been in this valley sometime in the geological past we started collecting samples out of these terraces to try and ascertain their their age and there was one really big problem though as we were driving down stream following the course this river mapping terrace after Terrace you could project the water level from these lakes right out through the gorge of the tanco River there in other words there was nothing to hold the water in and so we started puzzling over well what was the dam what actually created these lakes in the first place and when we got down to just near the head of the gorge of the tangka River we found our candidate which is essentially these glacial moraines these piles of Earth that were bulldozed by a glacier that came off the high peak of namja baro up here as ice at some time in the past bulldoze these these giant moraine ZUP and notice it's truncated here these Marines had extended all the way across the valley you can find scraps of this glacial debris on the far side of the valley it dammed the river what happens when you dam a river well you get a lake behind it but what happens when you dam a river with a wall of ice that's not exactly the best thing in the world to make a dam out a visit and what happens is essentially when you float the dam you release the lake it's a recipe for causing a really big flood and the truncated nature of these moraine sort of or the occurrence of these big floods in the past and I got really excited because this is not what I'd gone to Tibet to try and work on and see in the process of science when you discover something unexpected you know that really is where a lot of the joy of doing science comes into it and so I got really excited was really thrilled about this and I started to then talk to some of the local Tibetan villagers about how thrilled I was to have discover and that their Valley had been filled with a lake at some time in the past and that a really big flood had drained the lake and essentially created the landscape the topography the geomorphology that we could see today and like this sort of story was translated from English to Chinese to Tibetan back to Chinese back to English and the reply that I got really kind of shocked me because it was basically something like oh yeah I know about that there were three boats stranded up there on the side of the valley when the lake drained am sitting there thinking you know I just discovered this thing how could you know about it and it basically there was an oral tradition of this lake draining in or a lake draining in this valley that I was unaware of at the time or before this trip and I was even more surprised when we got our carbon dates back from some of the lake sediments and they dated out at about the eighth century AD about twelve hundred years ago I think that's the late Tang Dynasty if I'm remembering that such things correctly and it turns out that there's this story of this gentleman shown on the screen behind me Padma Sun bhava guru Rinpoche the second tantric the second historical Buddha the tantric Buddha the guy who introduced Buddhism into Tibet through the valley of the saenko River by doing things like yes draining the lake by fighting the demon of the lake and essentially draining it to reveal the fertile farmland the people still farm today so in other words I had come to and I not done the geological field work ahead of time to put the story of this lake together and if I had heard that story I would have considered it a folk tale a folk story something that you know maybe they saw these kind of features I was seeing it was made a story that to try and explain the topography but this made me start to wonder whether or not there was AG real geological basis to the story of many of the world's flood stories because it seemed like there's at least a very plausible case to be made for this one in Tibet having its roots in an actual event that may have occurred some 1200 years ago well this got me into thinking about things like you know the world's other flood stories as you might imagine it would and I started to look at things like the global distribution of flood stories and you know many people have done this in the past but if you kind of look at it and parse the geography and the details in some of those stories you actually can put together some fairly interesting observations but the other flood stories are from the surround the Pacific Rim sort of in this area region there across North America mulaskey across the Midwest up into Scandinavia and of course there's a few very famous flood stories or one in particular out of the Middle East what about that distribution well it turned to that in a minute but what first about the characteristics of flood stories a lot has been made about the parallels between flood stories in different parts of the world and the most common elements among the world's flood stories are really that people survived destruction by water through some type of Bogor arc and many of the other details actually vary a lot between different regions but those key elements essentially that there was some means of escape that the flood was caused by water that's kind of a note that that's a gimme right and that somebody was safe to tell the story those are the three elements that you would have to have in terms of any flood story in order for the story to have been occurred been recorded and been essentially transmitted I got really interested then in the differences between flood stories not the commonalities they are distributed around many parts of the world not everywhere but the other question need to wrestle with in terms of thinking about whether or not a oral traditions like this actually could relate to real events is how long could you actually expect an oral tradition to survive transmission and still faithfully repeal it a story the best example I can find one that seems to be pretty clear is the Klamath Indian story recorded in 1865 that reads an awful lot like an eyewitness account of the eruption of Mount Mazama the one that formed Crater Lake about seventy seven hundred years ago if you read that and sort of filter it through the differences in culture and and state of scientific knowledge between the Native American community and the Klamath region some 8,000 years ago and today you can you can basically read it as almost an eyewitness description of the eruption and if that's right it suggests that oral traditions could at least have been transmitted down through on the order seven eight thousand years that number will come back a little later in the talk but it basically suggests that there may be something to the idea that these that stories of real of geological events could survive transmission to become some of the world's oldest stories now if you look at some of those details of different flood stories around the world and parse them a little bit there's sort of two areas that I'll go into the first at tsunami stories there's an awful lot of the world's flood stories that do not involve rainfall and this greatly mystified Christian missionaries to the South Pacific when they ran into stories in Tahiti and Fiji where the natives knew all about the flood but it didn't come from the sky it came from the sea and it came unexpectedly and they kept canoes at the ready in case it would come back again someday stories that read a lot like tsunamis have been recorded in Alaska South America the Pacific Northwest that the Pacific Islands as I mentioned Southeast Asia and one in particular that I'm fond of is the native story from the coast of Chile that tells how two great serpents bide to see who could make the sea rise more causing an earthquake and sending a great wave onto the shore and those parts of the world where you have what are known to geologist has subduction zones where you have one tectonic plate being shoved underneath the other where you get great earthquakes like I hope doesn't happen in Seattle anytime soon basically can generate fairly large tsunamis that if you read a lot of these native stories in these areas they sound an awful lot like eyewitness description of tsunamis similarly if you look towards the northern margins of the great Pleistocene ice sheets the sheets of ice that occupied the poles during the last major glacial periods there's stories in Scandinavia the one I told you about in Tibet some in Alaska stemmed from Oregon and Washington the Great Lakes region the Mississippi Valley that read like essentially dam break floods I they're probably related to events in those areas the one I'm particularly fond of is one captured in that that cartoon cover there that shows how Odin and his brothers killed you mer the ice giant and causing his blood which of course would be water from an ice giant to gush forth in a great flood which drowned a whole lot of animals and it's sort of central to Nordic Nordic mythology there's similar kinds of stories from Native American communities but the geography is essentially circumpolar in the northern hemisphere for the ones that involve ice now I'm not the first person by any stretch of the imagination to wrestle with the sort of the geography of flood stories worldwide a lot of people have done so and about a century ago a guy named James Fraser wrote a book called folklore in the Old Testament where he actually compiled a list of many of the world's flood stories and then went through them and sort of thought about what they might represent and tried to parse them into which ones were myths which ones were legends and his conclusion is worth reading I think in full because it's hundred years old and it's very good and he actually came to very similar conclusion to what I came to based on frankly less work he wrote that there seems to be a good good reason for thinking that some and probably many diluting traditions are merely exaggerated reports of floods which actually occurred weather is the result of heavy rain earthquake waves or other causes all such traditions therefore partly legendary and partly mythical so far as they preserve reminiscences of floods which really happened they are legendary and so far as they describe Universal Day losses which never happened they are mythical he was essentially arguing along the lines that I was a moment ago that you could sort of look back at real events underpinning some of these and that's some of the stories may be somewhat elaborated and to be to be fair there are some of the world's flood stories that I can't make any sense out of at all but I won't be talking much about them today so what about the historical basis for the Biblical Flood story I mean if you're going to deal with the world's flood stories you can't really ignore that one can you and I'm certainly again not the first person to wrestle with this and I'm not going to be the last but I do think if there's some ideas that really don't hold up to scrutiny at all notice the the source the prestigious journal that this the article is taken out of a decade ago the claim was made that Noah's Ark had been found on Mars in the world weekly news and I want to walk you through this example for the simple reason that sometimes even if you take somebody's argument at face value you can use their own logic to destroy their argument and this happens to be one of those examples so how is that well ok you notice the picture of the Ark here that's not actually the picture that they claimed came from Mars that's an artist's rendition obviously this though look actual photo of Martian Mountain Pete okay so this is the the photo of the outcrop right here that is said to look like this arc now how did they actually get this amazing photograph of Noah's Ark on Mars well they got it with a satellite that was basically shown over here now yet where I'm going with this the what's the problem here you've got a satellite image what is satellites do they look down right okay notice the respective on their actual photo of the Martian peak it's looking up so if this is an actual photo it was taken the moment before that satellite crashed and I'm not aware of NASA having that kind of an accident with a satellite that was looking for Noah's Ark but in any case this is sort of a nice example of how you can take essentially an argument that someone would make and follow it through to its logical conclusion and it just pardon the pun doesn't hold water well so what about other ideas about the possible origin of the story of Noah's Flood I actually think that there's two possible the sets of events that may be recorded in the Biblical Flood story the first was really proposed by a guy named George Smith who in 1872 translated the an Assyrian flood story that bore a striking resemblance to the biblical flood story Smith's story is backstory is that he grew up in the early 19th century in England it was fascinated by discoveries in the Middle East the cuneiform writing and he actually taught himself how to read cuneiform writing the sort of the indentations that were made with a stylus onto wet clay and then baked into what became these these tablets that recorded a lot of economic data as it turned out and then also great stories from from the region and Smith got hired by the British Museum after the calamity happened where archaeologists had been excavating that I have to go back and read my own book I forget where they're at who Nineveh I believe it was and they had essentially hacked a whole bunch of these clay tablets that they had found and put them into crates shipped them back to the British Museum but they didn't pack them very well and so when they got back to the British Museum what they had thought were all these sort of clay tablets this sort of like odd pottery that they had discovered turned out have been fragmented into tiny bits and then they realized that all the indentations on it was actually writing and what they had basically done is shipped a whole library home to England and destroyed it in progress in transit so they essentially ended up with the world's greatest jigsaw puzzle with the world's oldest books Smith basically got hired to find comb through these little pieces and trying put these books back together to try and figure out what they said and he spent a decade toiling in the basement of the British Museum trying to figure these things out and then he finds this piece here which basically tells the story when he translated it of a righteous man who is who was warned by a God of an impending flood and told to take his his livestock and his family put them on a boat they did so they rode out through seven days and nights of rainfall crashed onto a mountain peak after releasing three birds that went out to go look for dry land and then there was a rainbow and they built a fire and made made an offering that's the story of Noah's Flood it's it's the Biblical Flood story but it predates the Bible substantially and this made big headlines in England back in the 1870s when it was discovered that the Prime Minister of England shared the stage with Smith when he was essentially announced his discovery of essentially an idea of the story of Noah's Flood and so what is it about this area in this region that may blend itself to a geological basis for the story of Noah's Flood well as anyone been to New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina and sort of gone to the convention center and look at the sign that's about you know four or five feet over your head that says sea-level this is a fairly disturbing thing for a geologist to see and stand below and it turns out that in big river deltas you'll often find that the high ground is right along the river and the levees of the river and land slopes off to the sides why well when it floods the coarse sand settles out right by the river and it builds the high ground like the French quarters on the far areas though when the river overtops its banks as big rivers eventually do in a big enough rain somewhere upstream basically the surrounding train feels like a bathtub well the Delta of the Tigers from Euphrates rivers was very similar and there were very large prehistoric floods in the region it's possible that one of those actually flooding the valley wall to the wall at a depth that you couldn't sort of stand in and survive would have been the origin of the story of Noah's Flood I mean I can't tell you that it's not I can't on the other hand tell you that it was but I think it's a potential candidate it's a geologically plausible argument for what could cause a big flood in the region where the story can actually be traced back to its ancient Sumerian roots well the other possible I think geological explanation for the story of Noah's Flood proposal that was put forward by a pair of oceanographers Brian Pittman than their Black Sea hypothesis and it's basically rooted in the idea that as at the end of the last glacial period as ice melted off the poles and sea level rose there was a last gasp of meltwater coming off of North America that raise sea level just enough to spilled to decant the Mediterranean into the Black Sea almost 8,000 years ago and what happened what happens when you basically connect a large body water at a higher elevation to a smaller body of water at a lower elevation where well the lower one fills up to the level of the higher one and you'll notice in the both imagery of the black sea here I think here's the the Bosphorus where the Mediterranean is thought to have spilled into the Black Sea notice all this sort of flat land essentially on the margins Ryan and Pitman basically suggested in a book I think called the Noah's Flood a decade or two ago they argued that this event filling up the valley the Black Sea very rapidly probably drowned some of the world's earliest farming communities and that the the story of that traumatic event may have been preserved in the story in stories of great floods for people's that sort of fled in different directions including the ancestors the ancient Sumerians who brought the flood the story of the Great Flood - - ancient Sumeria where it then became the story that Smith then discovered later and I'm not going to argue to which of these two events may is more likely to be the origin of the story of Noah's Flood frankly I think you can make a good case either way but what I was really intrigued by when I was doing the research for this book was it was not so much those ideas because I was vaguely familiar with both of them but what I was really intrigued with was how well scientists immediately started arguing about well did the Black Sea flood happen how when did it happen how many times did it happened how much did it fill up when and we were still arguing about elements of that I believe creationists we're really starting to argue about we're immediately outraged that here was some scientists claiming to have found geological evidence that might be interpreted as supporting a biblical story and they're actually outraged and that intrigued me because I didn't really understand why that would be I thought they might like be really happy with this for some and it turns out that the more I started getting into it the more I sort of realized well Ryan Pittman had discovered the wrong flood they had discovered a flood that only involved a small area not covering the whole world and that there's a sub subset of Christianity that believes that Noah's Flood that still believes that Noah's Flood actually covered the entire world and so these guys had discovered evidence for the wrong flood so they must be wrong and therefore they should be outraged this set me off on a path of trying to actually try and understand the history of thinking about what you might call natural philosophy or natural theology in Christianity to try and understand well where did this sort of level of outrage that that was blowback that Ryan and Pitman received where did it actually come from what were the roots of it and so I started looking into early early Christian natural theology and ran across works like those by origin who in the second century AD in writing about the the first chapter of Genesis wrote that now what man of intelligence will believe that the 1st and the 2nd and 3rd day in the evening in the morning existed without Sun and Moon and stars I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicated certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events in other words there's been a long-running conversation and argument within Christianity dating back to the very earliest days of Christianity about how to interpret the stories that are in the Bible that relate to things that geologists now study like the origin and age of the world and and things like really big floods in the shaping of topography now with my background I was not fully versed in that not aware of it and I was very intrigued by this long-running sort of argument and between the engagement and relationship between faith and reason st. Augustine in the 4th century AD we also weighed in on things like this and when he wrote that let no one think that because the psalmist says he established the earth above the water we must use this testimony of Holy Scripture against these people who engage in learned discussions ignorant of ignorant of the sense of these words they will more readily scorn our sacred books than disavow the knowledge they have acquired by unassailable arguments or proved by the evidence of experience Augustine was arguing quite explicitly against Christians adopting views of the natural world that could be contradicted by direct observations of the natural world because he then believed that would make it very difficult to sell other people on the religion itself and he then he also though believe that Noah's Flood was a global global flood but he believed this based on the application of Reason through what he saw in the rocks why well what he basically saw were seashells in rocks on mountaintops and if you have marine organisms embedded in the very structure of the world at the highest elevations in your landscape and he was in northern Africa where this is essentially the case you can interpret that one of two ways either the sea used to cover the peaks and that's and then there was water up above there and that's how the marine organisms got there or the mountains rose from beneath the sea to where they are today and in his day the latter was the moat the more outrageous thing to assume st. Thomas Aquinas again the 13th century also accepted the reality of a global flood pretty much for the same reasons you could see fossil marine organisms in the rocks on mountaintops but he explicitly argued for understanding nature what he called God's other book on seeking to understand both Scripture and the world around us his basic argument was that since in his view God wrote the Bible and created nature those to rent areas in which you could investigate and think about the nature of truth had to tell the same story because they shared the same author and in other words if you learned something about the nature of the world you should have enough faith in nature and in God's creation of nature to essentially think about reinterpreting any elements of the Bible that were in conflict with that because in the end the two could not be in conflict we all sort of know the story of how Galileo was subject to house arrest for doing you know outrageously naughty things like training a telescope at the heavens but I got very interested in sort of how he was his motivations and he was not really trying to attack the Catholic Church in with his investigations obviously and one of my favorite quotes from him about this time was I did not feel obliged to believe that the same God who is endowed as the senses reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use this is a quote that I think is as pertinent in modern politics as it is in Galileo's day but in terms of Galileo's direct connection to the Catholic Church he wrote in a letter to the Grand Duchess Christina and trying to explain his views and why he was not really attacked he's not really trying to set up his ideas in conflict to the church he wrote that if anyone shall set the the authority of Holy Writ against clear and manifest reason he who does this knows not what he has undertaken free opposes to the truth not the meaning of the Bible which is beyond his comprehension but rather his own interpretation now what is in the Bible but what he has found in himself and imagines to be there in other words he was basically arguing that if we discover things as rational beings about the nature of this world the process that we now know as science if that stands in conflict with what one interprets in a book like the Bible then maybe it's the interpretation that ought to be you know closely re-examined as the first step well let me return back to Jew morphology because that was the digression there through a micro history of theology was one I really had to go through myself in terms of trying to understand the nature of how people have looked at flood stories through time and it was fascinating but took me more time than I thought it would to write this book because the story was a lot more interesting in terms of the cross-pollination between science and religion but so back in the 18th century 17th century the theories for typography were essentially the three that are shown up there on the board thinking about how landscapes were shaped landscapes were shaped either on the third day of creation they were made the way that we see them today back when they are made in others they haven't changed much which means the job for geomorphologist would be really easy we just do a one-off that's the way it was we're done right secondly the topography was carved by Noah's Flood essentially that the world's topography was a direct consequence of humaneness behavior and sin and that topography was the world we know today and walk around on is the chaotic aftermath of the flood on the idea that all the world's sedimentary rocks and the fossils that are contained within them were laid down by the flood was a very central argument in the 17th century and finally there has been enough earthquakes in those days to essentially acknowledge that they played a minor role in shaping the land surface but those first two were really the sort of the theoretical framing devices the theories if you will which 19th century natural full 17th century excuse me natural philosophers essentially framed their view geology and it turns out that the first person who really put together a very comprehensive sort of theory of the world I'm called it a sacred theory of the earth was was not a natural philosopher at all he was he was a theologian as a Cambridge theologian Thomas Burnett who wrestled with the problem that was very seen very much as a current one in those days that there wasn't enough water on earth to explain Noah's Flood people had done they had sort of added up how much water was in the clouds Adams water was sort of circulating in the on the surface of the earth and was very you couldn't essentially cover the world's highest peaks with the water that was there and so people Burnett came up with what was actually a very clever solution to the problem he basically argued that the world when it was created was essentially an oblate spheroid an egg like thing we'll just call it a sphere that was basically had three different layers in it and that the outer layer was a layer of rocks and stones that formed the surface that we walk around on there was an inner layer that was an interior ocean and there was a very metal rich dense core and this three layer configuration allowed him to propose a very clever idea for how Noah's Flood could have occurred when you couldn't find enough water on the surface of the earth today to explain it and what he basically said is that when God created the world and started the Sun started to then heat up the outer crust of the world which started to fracture and crack and right at the peak of human wickedness the shell of the earth collapsed into that interior ocean generating Noah's Flood and then the waters all drained back down into the into the the rocky rubble of the mess so they were the water was hiding somewhere within the earth and this was actually a very clever idea but he ran into a lot of flack immediately first as you might imagine if you've ever tried to ever tried to float a gravel on a glass of water it doesn't work very well yeah it would be very difficult for his exterior shell to float on top of an interior seat from this again you can run the experiment yourself with the glass water so each so he originally caught flak from natural philosophers but he also caught a lot of flack from theologians why well imagine the theological problems if with the setup for the biblical story of Noah's Flood if God created the world pre-programmed for destruction then God knew we were going to fail the test of and good or wicked and so why put us through it all in the first place there's certain theological problems that come and so he got he got attacked by both theologians and natural philosophers and this is not one of those cases where if you make everybody mad you're doing the right thing it sometimes it means you're actually just wrong and even the founding father of geology the person that I learned about in my history that the what limited history of science I was exposed to as an undergrad or grad student he's the person we looked to as sort of as the founding the founding philosopher if you will of geology because he proposed principles founding principles that are still used today to interpret the rock record and he did this essentially because he was working for the Grand Duke of Tuscany ferdinand ii i believe it was and he was a master he was trained as a medical doctor and he's a master dissection assume farmers a farmers fishermen excuse me pulled up a great white shark and cut off its head and send it up to the to the grand palace steno was the guy who got the job of dissecting it and in the in the 17th century a public lecture like this would be cutting something up up here and we'd all be sort of fascinated by the gross miss of it all but this was essentially so public lectures in those days he got the job of dissecting this great shark and what he noticed when he did that was that the teeth of these sharks were identical to things known as tongue stones they were like dead ringers as close as two eggs to one another was his quote and when he realized and what tongue stones were were things that people found weathering out of rocks they didn't know whether they were petrified lightning strikes or what they were steno said no these are shark's teeth and he nailed it he basically convinced people of that with the treatise if he wrote on it but it brought up this problem of well if shark's teeth are eroding out of rocks or in mountains how did the teeth get in the rocks in the first place and that's what started steno off in thinking about his principles of geology and the ones that he came up with we're actually fairly simple and we still use them today if you have a pile of sedimentary rocks rocks that have been deposited by stuff settling through water well the oldest stuff is on the bottom the youngest stuff is on the top you know no one's going to argue that and steno basically tried to his principles in his words to be so clear that nobody could really object to them in other words if you apply them you're the inferences you draw from them are correct and he also his second principle was that it that that stuff was laid down horizontally so if you found rocks that are tipped up on their side they've been tipped since they were deposited very clear very simple still taught in introductory geology ideas notice that with his garb here he at the end of his life he was a Catholic bishop that point will come back what instead of then actually sort of do he applied his non his principles to interpreting the topography of the area around of Tuscany and he came up with a six stage model for the history of the world the third stage of which was you guessed it Noah's Flood so the grandfather of geology the person who basically laid down the founding principles was interpreting the evidence that he saw through applying those principles through the theory of Noah's Flood a theory with quotes right but the idea that he was in he was filtering his interpretation through that as his his view of it now after stato basically demonstrated that fossils were actually real objects they weren't just things that happened to be petrified in the in within the world they were the remains of real organisms that died in real events and got buried in real rocks the recognition that fossils were real things was seen by many as compelling evidence of Noah's Flood and it's you have a lot of bones in the rocks a lot of fossils those may be things that were essentially drowned and this fossil over here homo die lluvia testes that was popularized by Jakob tortures a Swiss naturalist in the early 18th century was was held for as a solid evidence of Noah's Flood in terms of being a drowned sinner they thought it was a human fossil it turns out it's actually a giant salamander but this this wasn't actually figured out for another 50 or 100 years depending on which source you want to cite but the point is that people started looking at and thinking about bones they found in rocks I'm thinking about tying them back to organisms but and early on they were seen as compelling proof of Noah's Flood there were bones of mammoths that were unearthed in upstate New York that showed that were interpreted to show that Adam was well over 100 feet tall based on the verse in the Bible that talks about there being giants in those days and the idea that if you look at the femur of a mammoth you know other than its great size it kind of looks like a human femur you know kind of the way a giant salamander that's been squished and buried in rock looks like a person that's been squished and buried in rock but if you interpret that giant leg bone as from a human being and you back out the scale of them they were gigantic this all really started to change I think when a Scottish farmer discovered evidence for what we now call geologic time off the coast of Scotland this is James Hutton he was a Scottish farmer who was very interested in thinking about the way that the surface of the world worked he was motivated in part by watching sand erode off of his fields and noticing that what was leaving his fields was very similar to the sand that was actually in the rocks that he used to build the walls around his field and he started puzzling about sort of long periods of time and how those kind of things could work he basically found evidence at this outcrop called siccar point just east of edinburgh for earth history being much longer and involved much deeper time although he didn't use that phrase then people had thought at that time when the thing the general thinking was that the world is a few thousand years old based on Bishop Buster's famous accounting of time from the Bible what is it about this outcrop that did that we'll notice there's these vertical rocks these grey rocks in through here these are actually grey they're stained red from these upper ones but they're they're grey they're poking through back there but there's like sandstone this standing vertical and then another packet of sandstone on its side tilted and there's a what's known as an unconformity running through here a boundary between these two packets of rocks now if you take stenos principles that we just went over a few minutes ago that sedimentary rocks that are laid down the oldest ones at the bottom and they're laid down flat you can basically unpack if you will this outcrop to realize that this is the oldest stuff down here why wilt on the bottom and it's standing vertical it wasn't formed that way so you can basically read the story of us of sand they're made out of say if you got up there and broke a piece off you'd see their sandstone they're basically made out of sand that's been lithified or turned into rock so you can basically know that this much girl got laid down flat at the bottom of an agency as sand it had to over rode it off of some mountains or uplands somewhere to actually get there it was deposited there was a stack of it deposited it got buried deep enough to be compressed into hard rock because this unconformity cuts in well then it got tipped up just buried tipped up eroded off then more sand is deposited and again it was flat then it gets buried deep enough to be turned into rock then it gets tipped up and then uplifted enough to be exposing the coast today with this wooden realized this meant is that this story told by this one simple outcrop was far more complex than could be fit into the biblical story of an initial creation followed by a single flood as explaining all the world's topography and geology why well there's two l/2 generations - periods of deformation this outcrop tells the story of the life and death of two mountain ranges and that's one catastrophe too many to fit into the biblical narrative Hutton basically argued this space indicated the geological time had was essentially vast and almost unknowable in its scope and again again that is one of the hardest things for for novice geologists to wrap their mind around is the great depth of geologic time still so by the 18th century well in the 18th century as scientists started to apply stenos principles to the geology of Europe they started to realize that there was actually multiple periods of geologic time they were starting to discover that there were more periods of geologic time than you could fit into the biblical narrative and if you just took all the little layers that you could trace across great areas in Europe thought about the time we take for that material to settle out and then integrate it up you're starting to get well over the single year that's allowed in the Biblical Flood narrative so the next piece of the puzzle that wanted to add was essentially involves fossils and that's the story of georges cuvier a french scientist who was a vertebrate anatomist and he was the type of scientist who does not do fieldwork people sent him bones he was the bone guy you found a bone somewhere in the world you sent it to give year and he would interpret it for you and he was by all accounts brilliant at that and when Napoleon's armies sent back samples of elephants and elephant heads and tusks and their molars he basically compared the the morphology of African elephants Indian elephants and mammoths and realized that the skulls that we know now is mammoths that were dug out of rocks fossil skulls bore no resemblance to any living elephants what Cuvier discovered in other words is he discovered extinctions and extinctions caused major theological problems because what was the story of Noah's Flood supposed to do well Noah was supposed to save two of everything and apparently he didn't save the mammoths no one had ever seen a living mammoth and everyone had always assumed that mammoth skulls and were being unearthed were basically you know elephant elephants that have one stripe or another that had died in the flood and cooki went on to actually study the the organisms that plants and animals in different layers of the rock record and managed to document that at each of these different periods in eras of geological time there was a different floor on fauna and what he basically inferred from that was that the life on earth had been created not once but many times and destroyed many times in other words there was a whole series of great catastrophes far too many catastrophes than could be accounted for in the biblical narrative and finally so and as this sort of geological discoveries were going on people the idea of which of these great catastrophes was actually Noah's Flood was an area of active debate and argument in early 19th century geology and the Reverend William Buckland who was the first professor of geology at Oxford originally came to fame by claiming to have discovered solid geological evidence for Noah's Flood in as the most recent of qjs grant catastrophes in this or the layer of gravel and cave filling sediments that could have blanketed northern Europe but eventually when Louie Agassiz the guy who the hall next door is named after demonstrated that the ice ages actually were responsible for laying down that blanket of gravel and those odd stray boulders that they're all over the place in Europe it basically eliminated the last geologic when the last traces of geological evidence for global flood so we can recap that the geological hunt for Noah's Flood started in the 17th and 18th centuries and and as people started to apply stenos principles to studying to studying nature to studying Earth's autobiography they realized that the rock record involved more events than simply the creation and the flood there was more to the natural narrative than actually gotten folded into the biblical one and in the late 18th and 19th early 19th centuries the flood was thought to be recorded in the surficial deposits that recommended just the most reason to those catastrophes but by the 1830s or 1840 at the latest it was pretty widely acknowledged within the geological sciences at least that there was no physical evidence of a global flood by the mid 19th century it was very well established that geological disturbed discoveries had essentially refuted the idea of a global flood a book the religion of geology by Edward Hitchcock the president of Amherst College was both a natural theologian and a geologist and that's to prompt me to remind you that most of the people we've been talking about so far not all the but most of them that were involved in the early study of geology were clergy those are the people who had the time and the expertise and the energy and the interest to actually go out and study how the world was put together and to try and understand the processes that had been used to shape and form it Hitchcock's summary here I think is well worth sharing for two reasons one it's interesting and I like 19th century writing I'm yes I will admit it but and but also note the date is from 1854 this is from before Darwin's famous book Hitchcock wrote that the history of opinions respecting the deluge of Noah is one of the most curious and instructive in the annals of man almost every geological change which the earth has undergone from its center to its circumference has at one time or another been ascribed to this deluge and so plain has this seem to those who had only a partial view of the facts that those who denounced as enemies of Revelation but most of these opinions in this dogmatism are now abandoned because both nature and scripture are better understood from what I can triangulate by about the mid to late 19th century the idea of a very young earth shaped by no Noah's Flood had been completely abandoned by geologists and had pretty much abandoned by mainstream Christian theologians who had basically bought into the arguments that well Augustine and Aquinas as arguments about the the God the the gods two books being in agreement with one another and by that by the end of the 19th century geologists well by the mid to late 19th century geologists had really moved on from the idea of studying Noah's Flood there were arguments about was it a regional flood nichette Caspian Sea Charles Lyell guy who wrote a very famous book that sort of kicked off modern geology wrote about Noah's Flood being from the flooding of the Caspian Sea it's kind of right and Pitons hypothesis one big sea over and there were lots arguments about sort of what may have been the other thing but the idea of a global flood was pretty much put to bed and geologists really started to essentially not look at evidence for really big floods they weren't looking for then the idea of grand catastrophes is things that could shape the surface of the earth fell wildly out of favor and the kind of Jay Harlen Bretz in the 1920s in his youth actually had the audacity to discover evidence for those big Missoula floods that you were talking about a little earlier when a glacial ice dam blocked the South Fork of the Clark River created glacial lake Missoula and notice this is Seattle over here under a lot of ice in the Pleistocene but when this ice dam failed this lake drained out and carved the channeled scablands of Eastern Washington landforms that really if you dart thinking in terms of a really big flood are really cryptic and hard to understand and had a scale that's really hard to see well Brett's figured this out on horseback on a car in a daze before you could actually get up in airplanes to figure it out you can look at NASA NASA satellite imagery today and it'd be a lot easier to put the story together Brett's did an incredible job of doing the field work the old school way while he was old school he was working the 1920s and 1930s and most of his geological colleagues didn't believe him for most of his career why well because we had already put to bed the idea of really big floods shaping topography you know the the war over noah's flood had been solved in the 19th century he couldn't possibly be discovering this kind of stuff it took most of his career and most of the 20th century for geologists to actually come around and for his views to be vindicated in terms of looking at what shaped the topography of Eastern Washington and the happy resolution of this story is that he was essentially recognized by the Geological Society of America before he died the downside is that wasn't until he was in his 90s and so he didn't I think most of the people he had fought with most of his career had already died but so geologists really over the course the 20th century came back to sort of thinking about the tension between the slow and steady processes that shape the surface of the earth every day and these kind of grand catastrophes that Cuvier and and brett's were talking about and so today now any sort of student coming out of an undergrad or graduate program geology is going to know he's going to have the tools to both look for evidence for big catastrophes and to integrate up the day-to-day processes that say Hutton was thinking about in terms of his deep time we sort of look at things in through both lenses but if we look at the state of sort of public awareness of geology today and we look at Gallup polls over the last 30 years or so from 1982 up to 2012 and we look at the proportion of the of the American public who essentially buy into the arguments of young Earth Creationism the world is actually fairly young it was created in that the shape that we know it today and presumably that Noah's Flood played a big hand in shaping that it's something on the order of 40 to 45 percent of the American public scarily close to about half of the American public and you'll notice that I haven't talked about evolution at all yet and I'm not going to why well I'm a geologist that studies things other than paleontology although I will show one side in a minute that we'll get back to that a little bit but I was very intrigued by how so much the American public could still believe things that the geological foundation for had been utterly disproved before Darwin ever got on board the Beagle um and so I went and visited the Creation Museum in Petersburg Kentucky now I I did this with a colleague and we were it was it was very interesting it's an incredibly well done Museum the what you first see when you come in as you essentially see Eve sitting here feeding a squirrel a carrot and there's this Jurassic Park Velociraptor hanging out next to her very comfortably and not going for her or the squirrel I think he's going after vegetation because as exhibits later there and this thing which would tell us that that carnivores were actually vegetarians in the Garden of Eden you also find though things like a triceratops with a saddle on it why well if as this museum argues and that the whole history of the geological history of the world involves the original creation and then noah's flood which deposited all the sedimentary rocks that have all the world's fossils in them then all those dinosaur bones that we find had to been of creatures that were living right before the flood and therefore since there were people before the flood the dinosaurs and people had to live together and presumably you know not unlike in the famous town of bedrock where everybody was happy and got along the things that really surprised me much more though were the nature of some of the exhibits actually within it when you go into one of the first exhibits you see reason explicitly defined as the enemy of faith and having been brought up in a Presbyterian household that was taught fairly different things I was quite surprised by this the displays essentially dismiss the reason as the enemy of faith and specifically accused scientists of a centuries-long conspiracy to question destroyed discredit criticized poison and replace God's Word and each one of those italicized words gets a whole panel where it then goes into discussing the argument what I couldn't get past though is is how anyone who's ever been to sort of a scientific meeting and sort of noticed how viciously we attack each other's ideas how mercilessly we rip each other's ideas apart I mean that is what we do as a profession the idea that we could actually pull off a concerns generational conspiracy to mislead the world about the very nature of science you know it's just beyond imagine and yet there it is it's laid out quite clearly I just don't understand the mechanics of how that could work although it may be apparently I haven't been inducted into whatever the secret society is that that is pulling this off yet you also find exhibits on how Noah's Flood deposited all the world's sedimentary rocks and fossils no real surprise there at this museum but the thing that is surprising are there's things like dinosaur footprints in sedimentary rocks fossilized footprints sort of what we call trace fossils and if you think about sort of that how the mechanics of that would work how do you actually form a footprint in a layer of sediment that's being deposited beneath or by a chaotic globe destroying flood that literally ripped up the surface of the earth reshaped and redeposit everything everywhere else you really had dinosaurs walking around on the bottom of the sea during that air breathing dinosaurs that's what would be required to explain those rocks in those kind of exhibits and never mind what it would take to explain how you would preserve a pair of mating Turtles so this brought me I had listed some 100 150 pages worth of in the book the rocks don't lie of detailed reputations of specific geological arguments that young earth creationists have made and they've got taken out in the interest of readability on which anyone who reads it should thank me for but that I was encouraged to think about sort of one of the sort of top three reasons for why the sort of the fatal flaws of flood geology or the idea that Noah's Flood really is responsible for the geological record that we have of life on earth and the first fatal flaw is the one that Thomas Burnet was wrestling with there's not enough water on earth to actually cover to cover the Himalaya the best graphics of it though were in the movie 2012 that was not really the best disaster movie ever as it says but there's really is a fundamental problem in terms of where all that water came from her went the other very fundamental problem that don't have listed up here but it's one of my favorites is Leonardo da Vinci's argument about why Noah's Flood did not shape the world's geology and lay down fossils and he had the very simple argument that well if was a global flood and it covered the world you would have had a sphere sphere oil spheroid Alysha surrounded by a sphere of water and what would happen there'd be no effect of slope to that water there'd be nothing to drive the flow it would be still water that wouldn't actually rip up anything wouldn't redeposit anything it wouldn't do any actual work if you had a global covering flood that actually covered the highest peaks the second fatal flaw of flood geology is the problem that was wrestled with and recognized in the 18th century and that's that the geological record involves a lot more than a single chaotic globe wrecking flood and if you just look at the color coding there on the geology of the Grand Canyon the fact that there's three different colors there's two unconformity x' you have this this the basement rocks down here which a creationist would argue might date from the original creation then you have a layer of sedimentary rocks and unconformity up here and then more layered sedimentary rocks even in their worldview you'd have to have two floods not one to explain this stack of rocks and we won't even argue about radiometric dating and all the other reasons why you can basically dismiss their argument here but their own logic does it for us and finally what I think is the perhaps the most troubling problem with note with the with the young earth creationist view of Noah's Flood are that 99% of all fossils are from extinct species and I have yet to hear a fairly coherent response to this problem from those who claim that all the world's fossils are a result of Noah's Flood because what this means of course is that either Noah did an absolutely terrible job at trying to get two of everything onto the ark and he got like one he got the one-percenters and that's it maybe there was a subscription or something I don't know how that worked but either that either he did a poor job of trying to actually fulfill his primary duty or there's something fishy with story you know you that's your choice so what does it actually led to the modern revival of young earth creationist I mentioned mentioned a little earlier that as far as I can tell the idea of a young earth shaped by global flood was pretty much out of mainstream Christian and II at the end of the 19th century if you go back and read some of the work other works by some of the people who signed the fundamentals that started off fundamentalism they were old earth creationists they were not people who believed in the in a young earth and Noah's Flood shaping the landscape these views really got revived in great part due to this book the Genesis flood that was published in 1961 it really launched I think the young earth creationist revival and was by an Old Testament scholar John Whitcomb and a hydraulic engineer Henry Morris who collaborated on this book and they were very clear that what they did is they basically took the biblical story as truth and then went to look for evidence to support their interpretation of that story and they advocated letting the Bible speak for itself and then trying to understand the geological data in light of its teachings in other words in modern in sort of scientific parlance that's sort of known as you know assuming the conclusion but they actually I actually put off reading their book to fairly late in the research process for this and that was a mistake I had fought that they basically would be far less rational than they turned out to be these guys actually laid out a really good and devastating critique of geology in the 1950s these guys knew what they were talking about in terms of critiquing the way geologists were not able to explain many of the things the basic features of the surface of the earth they at what they asked killed off the dinosaurs how did great stacks of sedimentary rock end up stranded high on continents above sea level how could mountains rise this is back to the question that Augustine is grappling with and why he thought Noah's Flood was a global flood he'd have a good model for how mountains could rise how did fossils of tropical Florida end up in rocks at the poles these are all questions that geologists in the theories that had been offered up to that point we're starting to had essentially collapsed and there were no really good answers for him and these guys were clever enough to figure that out pointed out frame their book and then say ah we know the answer there was a global flood that resurfaced the world and deposited all the sedimentary rocks and fossils in other words they dusted off Thomas Burnitz long discredited 17th century model what did they miss well note the date on their book 1961 Whitcomb and Morris pretty much missed and unplayed tectonics why well plate tectonics wasn't really accepted at the time it was barely even proposed pieces of it we're starting to fall into place in their day and plate tectonics is a good example of one of those ideas that comes together from different observations that then go put together to make a theory that actually answers questions that the developers of the theory never thought to posed and in my view that's actually a characteristic of a really good theory if you put something together based on evidence you make a prediction and then someone else's hey that also explains this that and the other thing and pieces start falling into place that's the hallmark of a good theory the hallmark of a bad theory is essentially if you have to keep invoking miracles to explain away the observations that don't coincide with your theory and this is the problem that Whitcomb and Morris ran into so they basically missed out on the plate tectonics revolution and haven't really looked back terribly since then and young earth creationists have been engaged in sort of selectively using and interpreting geological data ever since but one of the more constructive things that I learned in doing the research for this book in it and sticking sort of a couple toes in the water of theology was that the history of the philosophy and engagement between science and religion is far richer and more nuanced than we sort of tend to see today in the modern media of sort of pitting you know Bill Nye versus Ken Ham and those those kinds of pseudo debates there's an awful lot of thinking in history and people who've wrestled with the real questions about well how do you think about how to read stories in the Bible when confronted with this changing nature of geological science it keeps discovering things about the world and there's there's a it's a much richer and more engaging story than I think we tend to think about and frankly I think that there'd be a lot more be a lot more constructive for more people to engage on the real arguments that could be had rather than the ones that were sort of thrashed out 200 years ago and settled to all reasonable people at the time so what do I essentially come to myself and looking at this and thinking about well I've come to the conclusion that the so-called war between science religion really ought to be viewed as a conflict within religion over how to view science it's about essentially how to grapple with how how religions can grapple with discoveries about the material world science can go on I sort of doing its own thing quite happily without any particular religion or indeed any religion at all being being true but I think it's all religions really need to grapple with honestly grapple with the things that scientists can discover about the nature of the material world and the conversation that we're having essentially in the public today really is not doing that at a level that I think that the history of it sort of deserves and I think that modern young earth creationists and I want to modify that with young earth creationist abandoned faith that we went and what we can learn from the study of nature in other words they've sort of turned their back on what we can learn from God's other book and selectively cherry-picking data to support a case does not honor the data so where does this all leave us why is this important well I would argue to you that this century that we're at now the 21st century is incredibly pivotal point in the history of humanity we have some really big problems confronting us about the nature of the world our place in it our stewardship of the planet we're facing crises in water soil energy the atmosphere in terms of climate all which may come to a head later this century and frankly I think it's actually really counterproductive as a species for us to spend a lot of time debating arguments that were essentially settled a couple hundred years ago what does this mean essentially in my view for the the nature and the power of the story of Noah's Flood oh I think it is a very powerful story I think it's a very intriguing story I think it may very well have its roots in real events but I think that the modern sort of value of the story may lie much more in its nature as a as a teaching device about the the responsibility that humanity has to care for creation and actually carry forward all that is with us on this planet into the foreseeable future through the kinds of crises that we actually face in the coming decades and I think if we view the story of Noah's Flood through that lens it's actually still reads as a very powerful very powerful and very spiritual story in terms of the nature of humanity and our relationship to the world now people have always essentially used the filter of faith in the lens of reason to try and make sense of our place in the world but I think that the story of Noah's Flood is a very interesting historical example of how we can think through that and how we can look at the way that religious stories have actually helped shape the evolution and development of science and how theology has actually responded involved in response to that to those kinds of discoveries and I'll leave the story of Noah's Flood there with you obviously recommend the book the rocks do you don't write a book if you don't want people to read it so I obviously recommend that everybody reads it it's intended to make you you know think for yourself argue with it if you want the important parts to think about it and to think for yourself the previous books have written our dirt the erosion of civilizations about the history of farming and king of fish the thousand-year run of salmon about the history of salmon management in England New England and the northwest where I live their stories about how people interact with nature and our economic systems and can interact and with natural systems in ways that don't always lead to outcomes we desire and the most recent one it's coming out in November called the hidden half of nature the microbial roots of life and health that my I wrote with my wife she's a biologist and we've become utterly fascinated with the way that the recent discoveries in the last decade or two and it seems now every week in science and nature are revealing new ways that microbial life is influencing the macroscopic life that we know and how foundational that is to the practice of Agriculture and medicine and how wrong we've gotten some elements of that because we have not fully appreciated the role microbial life plays so thank you very much for the invitation I look forward to chatting with anybody at the reception afterwards money

Channel: Harvard University

Views: 470,414

Rating: 3.8790002 out of 5

Keywords: David R. Montgomery, Geology (Field Of Study), Harvard University (College/University), Radcliffe Institute For Advanced Study (College/University), Science (TV Genre), Religion (TV Genre), Noah's Ark (Art Subject)

Id: YMaUzNlDnSY

Length: 64min 35sec (3875 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/photolouis]

Good lecture, but terrible title.

[u/alllie]

From /r/LDQ

Montgomery explores the interface of science and religion through flood stories from cultures around the world. Many cultures have flood stories, floods being common.