Free The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood by David R. Montgomery

topography. First, those who did not think too deeply about such things generally believed landscapes were just two days younger than Earth itself, sculpted by the hand of God on the third day of creation. Then, there was the more scholarly view that valleys and mountains were carved by the Flood. Finally, some natural philosophers allowed the earthquakes known to have happened occasionally through history a minor role in shaping the land. Conventional wisdom still held that the world had been gradually wearing down through its short history. The future promised further decay as topography eroded and soils lost fertility.
    The view of the world as a wrecked and ruined place began to change in 1644 when renowned philosopher René Descartes set forth how Noah’s Flood followed his principles of nature—the laws of physics as he laid them out in his Principia Philosophiae . One of his theories concerned Earth’s origin and evolution. Mindful of Galileo’s treatment by the church, and well aware that his ideas did not accord with sanctioned interpretations, Descartes explicitly stated that his own theory was wrong. Cleverly inoculated from official censure, he claimed to offer a hypothesis useful for better contemplating nature.
    Descartes painted a picture of an Earth that began as a failed star trapped in the vortex of a neighboring star. The primitive Earth then cooled and segregated into a planet with distinct layers, leaving a still fiery core surrounded by a metal-rich inner crust. Above this lay an ocean, trapped below an outer crust made of stones, sand, and clay. Over time the heat of the Sun evaporated water trapped between the inner and outer crusts. Fissures coalesced into large fractures as the undermined and weakened outer crust foundered into the watery abyss, triggering a great flood and forming both mountains and seas.
    Descartes’ imaginative idea offered a way to generate the world’s topography all at once. His grand physical explanation for how to generate a global flood inspired other natural philosophers to think up ways to trigger the biblical flood. With little evidence available to contradict or refute any idea no matter how outrageous, competing flood theories soon posed creative ways to explain how God designed a world preprogrammed for destruction.
    Today, such theories seem fantastically ridiculous, like bizarre figments of feverish minds. But in their day, they were serious attempts to explain the world. Imagination raced ahead of understanding as the reality of Noah’s Flood was taken on faith in theories devised to explain the origin of topography. Facts only started to get in the way of a good theory once geological principles were systematized.
    After Galileo’s ordeal, Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher became a leading voice among clergy interested in natural history. Professor of mathematics, physics, and Oriental languages at the Jesuit College of Rome, he published lavishly illustrated natural history books that became wildly popular among the European elite. An eccentric by any standard, Kircher explored deep grottoes and canyons, even having himself lowered into the volcanic craters of Etna and Vesuvius to see what lay below ground. Finding subterranean streams high in the Alps, he saw the fact that some caves were filled with water and others with fire as the key to one of Earth’s great mysteries—the origin of rivers. His Mundus Subterraneus ( Subterranean World ), an encyclopedic compilation of geologic fact and fable published in 1664, suggested that ocean tides pumped seawater up into mountains through underground channels that connected to springs at the head of rivers. Fires deep beneath volcanoes, acting like a global radiator system, drove water up from holes in the bottom of the sea to feed mountain springs. Kircher had the concept of a hydrological cycle right, but the direction backwards. Today we know that water evaporates from the oceans and rains down on the