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

continents and then runs off into the sea.
    A decade later, in his Arca Noë ( Noah’s Ark ), Kircher maintained that God unleashed Noah’s Flood by causing vast underground lakes to overflow. Great blocks of the planet’s outer shell foundered into his subterranean reservoirs, leaving distorted layers of broken rock standing above ocean basins and lowlands. Mountains were the collapsed ruins of Earth’s original crust.
    Not everyone was convinced the flood was global. Kircher’s contemporary Isaac Vossius, Dutch theologian and librarian to the Queen of Sweden, argued for a local flood on the grounds that there simply was not enough water on Earth to submerge the highest mountains. He dismissed as pious fooleries proposals that God miraculously created extra water and then just as miraculously made it all disappear. Vossius argued that the few generations between Adam and the Flood could hardly have populated Mesopotamia, let alone the entire planet. Instead, he proposed that people must have occupied a limited area in Noah’s time because it was senseless for God to punish uninhabited places. Besides, the ancients often used universal terms to describe local events. The Flood need only have been universal in the sense that it overwhelmed humanity’s ancestral homeland. In his reading, the Bible revealed Noah’s Flood to have been a local affair.
    The amount of water required to flood the world also was a sticking point for Edward Stillingfleet, the Anglican Bishop of Worcester, who in 1666 wrote Origines Sacrae ( Sacred Origins ). He too considered a local flood consistent with biblical orthodoxy. According to his calculations, the world’s clouds could only produce enough water to cover the globe with a foot and a half of water—nowhere near enough to submerge the whole planet. Stillingfleet echoed Vossius in thinking that a regional flood could have destroyed mankind if humanity was restricted to the Middle East. A flood that affected a small part of the world would also mean that Noah only needed to load representatives of part of the animal kingdom on his ark. Stillingfleet did not favor invoking additional miracles not mentioned in scripture to explain a worldwide flood, or the logistical challenge of feeding a boatload of animals when all the world’s edible plants lay submerged beneath the waves.
    Stillingfleet and Vossius helped establish the legitimacy of belief in a local flood among theologians, but the propensity to interpret Noah’s Flood as a global deluge did not fade easily. Prominent seventeenth-century natural philosophers continued to use Noah’s Flood to explain geological observations, among them the grandfather of geology.
    The Dane Niels Stensen, better known as Steno, was the son of a successful Copenhagen goldsmith. Born into a Lutheran family on New Year’s Day in 1638, Steno was taught that at most the world would last another couple of centuries before God ended everything. His deep religious faith and strong interest in natural philosophy greatly influenced how he came to lay the foundation for modern geology. Raised in a Protestant stronghold of biblical literalism, he later worked and lived in Catholic countries where allegorical interpretations of the Bible were deeply rooted. His gradual migration south would change his worldview and encourage his curious, wondering mind to think broadly.
    At the age of eighteen, Steno enrolled at the University of Copenhagen to study medicine. There he learned the supposed curative properties and medicinal virtues of crystals and fossils such as tongue stones—rock-hard triangular objects with serrated edges. Prized since ancient times, powdered tongue stones were thought to ward off evil or attract affection and were commonly sold as cures for plague and bad breath. They could be found scattered on bare ground after heavy rainstorms, and there were many theories of how they formed. Some thought the strange objects fell from the sky. Others