The Abyss of Time: When Genesis Met Geology

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.                                                                   

Genesis 1:1-5 (New Revised Standard Version)

So begins the Bible--probably the most influential book in human history. As its famous first lines declare, the Bible begins at the very beginning, with the creation of the universe by a single, all-powerful God. It's an impressive start--those are some of the most stirring and powerful words ever written. The Genesis creation story has given meaning to people's lives for millennia by telling them how the world began and where they fit into it. It tells believers that humans are God's special creation, placed at the center of the universe and charged with dominion over the rest of the earth. But it also tells them how we fell from grace, after Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. That's when they and all their descendents were driven from Eden, and when toil, suffering, strife, and death came into the world. A dangerous thing, knowledge.

The Deluge / Gustave Doré

Until a couple hundred years ago, there was little reason to think the Genesis creation story wasn't basically true. It seemed as plausible as any other account. It also had the advantage of being epic and awe-inspiring while giving people answers to very big questions--not just factual questions like "where do we come from?" but questions of meaning and morality as well: Why are we here? Why is there evil and pain? How should we live? What role do we play in this creation? 

As compelling as the Genesis account is, there have always been those who thought it shouldn't be seen as completely, literally true. St. Augustine, for example, didn't think the Genesis creation story was the last word on factual knowledge of the natural world, and cautioned other believers against insisting that it was. As he wrote in The Literal Meaning of Genesis:

It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are. In view of this and in keeping it in mind constantly while dealing with the book of Genesis, I have, insofar as I was able, explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation.

Like many other Christian and Jewish scholars through the ages, Augustine believed Genesis was intended as a spiritual work, not a scientific one. He thought many passages should be read allegorically, with an eye to what they say about our relation to the creator, instead of the exact features of his creation.

Still, even subtle thinkers like Augustine had little reason to think the creation account wasn't literally true in broad outline: that the world was a few thousand years old, for example, or that a great flood had shaped the world we see today. No compelling alternative existed for over 1000 years after Augustine.

Siccar Point / Photo by Anne Burgess

The first to start thinking in new directions were geologists, but their change of view took time. In the 1600's, Nicolas Steno, whose stratigraphic principles are still fundamental to geology today, believed that in tracing the history of rocks he was tracing the results of Noah's flood. In the late 1700's, however, James Hutton proposed that the landscapes around us weren't formed all at once, but gradually, by the same processes we see around us today--erosion by wind and water, deposition of sediments by rivers, the shaping of sand dunes by the wind, and so on. At a rock outcrop in Scotland called Siccar Point, Hutton noted that dramatically tilted layers of sedimentary rocks were overlain by flat layers of a different sedimentary rock. Pondering how this came to be, he started to understand the true depths of earth history. The first layer, he reasoned, had been deposited horizontally in an ancient sea and solidified into rock. How long this took, Hutton didn't know, but it was a lot longer than a few thousand years. And that was just the beginning. These rocks were then uplifted and tilted by powerful (but slow) geologic forces, worn down again by erosion, and then covered by another sea, where a new layer of rocks formed on top of them. If all this had occurred at the same rates we see today, the length of time required would be almost unimaginable--not thousands of years, but millions, or hundreds of millions. Hutton's friend John Playfair, who visited the same spot with him, later wrote, "the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time."

Despite Hutton's dizzying insight, most geologists of the day kept seeing the landscape as having been shaped by the great deluge. By the 1830's, however, most of them had realized the model wasn't tenable. The curved valleys and far-flung deposits of gravel and boulders found in northern Europe turned out to have been deposited by ice, not water. As for the rock strata and the fossils they contained, they were too uniform and well-organized to have been deposited by a flood. A great flood would have scrambled all the sediments together, not stacked them into layers with distinctive fossils that changed regularly from the bottom to the top of the stack. The flood model just didn't add up. That's why, two decades before Darwin published his theory of evolution, geologists had rejected the idea that the earth was created in a literal six days a few thousand years ago, and then shaped by a worldwide flood. Many of these geologists were devout Christians, but they were also scientists dedicated to the idea that evidence trumps theory, not vice versa. The evidence in the rocks pointed to a very different story than the one Genesis told.

Whether or not the Genesis creation story was true in an allegorical or spiritual sense, scientists had shown that it was not true in a literal sense. It wasn't science or history--it was mythology. In fact, later in the 1800's scholars found that it was based on even older myths from Mesopotamian civilizations that long pre-dated Hebrew society. These stories featured a worldwide flood and a hero saving his fellow beings by putting them in a boat, and like Noah, they even sent out birds to see if the flood waters were receding.

Scholarly opinion had moved on from the literal view of creation, and most educated Christians moved on with it. They didn't necessarily believe in evolution, at least evolution without God's guidance, but most of them did accept that the earth was incredibly ancient. Young Earth Creationism (YEC) of the type that exists today got its start in the early 20th century, when a Seventh Day Adventist named George McCready Price began publishing books attacking mainstream geology. His first book was actually called Illogical Geology. McCready's torch was taken up by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris in their 1961 book The Genesis Flood, which insisted that the stratigraphic record of rocks and fossils was laid down by the flood. Fossils, they said, were bones of the animals killed by the flood. Scientist's claims that those fossils changed in a systematic way over time were simply nonsense--lies and wishful thinking.

Generally, modern creationists have explained changes in fossils from lower to higher in the geologic column with three different hypotheses. The first is that such vertical sorting might be caused by the different hydrodynamic properties of organisms. Some would sink to lower strata, while the more buoyant or less streamlined ones stay in the upper layers. Then there's the idea that organisms have differing success in running toward the high ground. Humans got farther up the hillsides than tortoises before the waters caught them (Lowland plants found only in the uppers layers are clearly a problem for this idea). Finally, creationists have argued that different strata, with their characteristic assemblages of fossils, represent ecosystems from different parts of the earth, transported and then neatly stacked by the flood waters.

Young Earth Creationism got more popular after Whitcomb and Morris's book, and it remains popular today, especially in the United States. According to a Gallup poll in 2012, 46% of Americans agreed that, "God created human beings in pretty much their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Organizations like the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis, which runs the famous Creation Museum in Kentucky, are very influential among evangelical Christians, and have big, well-designed websites. The creationist presence on the web is huge and misleading. If you do a Google search for topics related to evolution, geology, or even cosmology, as many as half the links that come up promote creationism. This is in spite of the fact that only 2% of working scientists believe that "Humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time."

Not only is sudden creation/young earth creationism rejected by the vast majority of scientists, it differs from the mainstream view by orders of magnitude. The scientific consensus is that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old. That means people who believe the earth is 10,000 years old or less think the Earth is 460 thousand times younger than scientists do. If the scientists are right, then as the physicist Lawrence Krause pointed out, the creationists are making as big a mistake as if they believed the United States were 17 feet across. Put another way, it's like mainstream scientists and young earth creationsts are arguing over whether the Empire State Building is 1250 feet high or less than half an inch. Not only that, but if the YEC people are right, then it's not just the theory of evolution that in trouble. Fundamental principles in all the sciences, including physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, biology, and anthropology, would have to be abandoned. We're not talking about trivial differences of opinion here. Somebody is wrong, and wrong in a very big way.

But who? Obviously, anyone who follows this blog knows I'm going to side with 98% of scientists over 46% of the general public. Modern creationists have revived a view that was long ago tested and rejected by geologists. I think that's one of the best, and least appreciated, arguments against creationism: scientists already rejected it long ago, and not because they had some kind of atheist agenda, but because the evidence just didn't support it. In fact, most of them were Christians who initually believed in the literal creation story, and fully expected the rocks to support that story. When it didn't, like good scientists they abandoned that hypothesis, though sometimes with great reluctance.

Another way of putting this is that if the young earth/Noah's flood view had been correct, things would have gone in exactly the opposite direction by now. Scientists from around the world, Christian and otherwise, would have been convinced by multiple lines of converging evidence that the earth is young and was shaped by the flood. Many old-earthers would have held out, sometimes for decades, but eventually they would either have had to accept the young earth and flood theory or stop claiming to base their views on the data. But that's not what's happened. What happened was just the reverse. The rocks said what they said, and scientists accepted the testimony of nature over preconceived ideas, because that's how science works. That's what science is.

That's one reason faith-based creationism can't be a science, and shouldn't be taught in science class, no matter what the "creation scientists" claim. In science, evidence always trumps ideology--perhaps not immediately, but eventually. With creationism, it's the other way around--ideology trumps evidence. Most creationists admit that they see scripture, not empirical evidence, as the ultimate authority on what is true. They start by assuming the truth of the Bible, and then try to find ways to prove it. And that's simply not science.

Still, the creation story in Genesis could be treated as a set of testable scientific hypotheses. This is still problematic, because it's full of miracles, and those are by definition beyond the natural laws that science is concerned with. But the story does make real predictions. For example, the earth should show signs of being just a few thousand years old. Life (human and otherwise) should appear suddenly in the fossil record. The surface of the earth should have features consistent with a massive worldwide flood. What would happen if we tested these predictions scientifically--not with ad hoc ideas crafted to support the young earth theory, but with real, mainstream science? In other worlds, what would happen in a world where radiometric dating methods really work, where the speed of light is constant, where evolution and rock formation are mostly slow, and where floods leave the kind of record we observe real floods leaving? What if we assumed, for the sake of argument, that the world really was created all at once a few thousand years ago, and that most of earth's geologic and fossil record was created in one year by a massive global flood? What would the world be like if that were true? Would it really look like the world we see around us? That's the question I'll try to answer in my next post.

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Genesis. BibleGateway.com

Genesis vs. Geology / Stephen Jay Gould

The Evolution of Creationism / David R. Montgomery

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

http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-design.aspx

http://www.people-press.org/2009/07/09/section-5-evolution-climate-change-and-other-issues/

Teaching Creationism is Child Abuse / Lawrence Krause

Going to Extremes: Coke Commercials, Diversity, and Why We're More United than We Think

The Golden Rule - Norman Rockwell

Why is it that the most spirited public debates in this country seem to revolve around pop culture and processed food? We've had dust-ups over Chick-Fil-A, Miley Cyrus, Duck Dynasty, and now it's a Coke commercial aired during the Superbowl. The commercial features people singing "America the Beautiful" in many different languages, and that got some folks pretty riled up. Sure, there are wars and massive human rights violations going on around the world, and the NSA is still vacuuming up every piece of personal data it can find about us, but somehow those things just don't spark our interest as much.

Still, the fact that there are bigger issues out there doesn't necessarily mean these commercial controversies are trivial. Gay rights are an important issue, despite the rather circus-like atmosphere of the Chick-Fil-A and Duck Dynasty debates. The Coke commercial controversy is about a real issue too, because it shows the divisions in our views about what the United States of America, culturally speaking, is and ought to be. I thought the ad was kind of beautiful, though I try not to let myself get too moved by commercials. But others disagreed, and some of them showed a really hateful, xenophobic side when they did. Apparently these hateful tweeters don't realize that the actors and singers in the commercial are Americans, many of whom were likely born in this country and speak perfect English, in addition to their other languages.

So, I came down squarely on the liberal side regarding the commercial, but I found I can't fully agree with either side when it came to the debates about it. Obviously, I couldn't agree with the conservative view. I kept seeing people talking as though "American" and "English-speaking" were somehow inseparable, and who seemed to think that singing "America the Beautiful" in any other language should be taken as a deliberate insult. That point of view completely mystifies me. Maybe somebody singing that song in, say, Arabic really does think America is beautiful? I know Americans who could sing the song in English or Arabic, and they would mean every word of it in either one.

Then I noticed a guy, who didn't approve of the commercial, talking about all the things he thought liberals hate about America. That was a little confusing, because I'm a liberal, and I don't hate America, and I don't know any other liberal who does, either. Yes, we're more likely than conservatives to acknowledge the country's flaws and failings, from slavery to arrogant foreign policies, and we're more likely to disagree with the idea that our country can do no wrong. But that's not remotely the same as hating America. Liberals (and many conservatives) tend to reject "my country right or wrong" thinking. We think more like the German-American senator and general Carl Shurz, who said, "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." And we love our country.

But then I noticed that it's not just conservatives accusing liberals of hatefulness. The same guy who said liberals hate America also kept making the point that liberals were always calling him a racist for his conservative opinions, such as thinking all immigrants should learn English. I don't know if he's a racist or xenophobe or not--lots of people who hated that commercial obviously are--but he's got a point in this case. Thinking it would be a good idea for everyone in a country to have a common language is not racist. In fact, I think it's a good idea, too, just because it would help people understand each other and help the country function more smoothly, not because I think there's anything particularly sacred about English. I'm sure many immigrants agree with me, too. But I also think it would be a tragedy if people didn't pass on their other languages to their children.

I do think liberals are too quick to accuse conservatives of hatred and racism. Yes, some of them are hateful and racist (and so are a few liberals). But many of them aren't, and I don't blame them for being frustrated at being called something they aren't. I know I don't like being told I hate America. So, maybe we should reserve terms like "hatred" and "racism" for the real things, instead of throwing them around every time someone disagrees with us. There's plenty of real racism and hatred we still have to deal with, after all.

This phenomenon, where both sides think the other is more extreme and hateful than they really are, is well known to psychologists. Oftentimes, what's really extreme is not the opinions of those we disagree with, but our misjudgement of what they really think. In one important study, psychologists asked people across the political spectrum to fill out a questionaire about their moral beliefs. Then they took self-described liberals and conservatives and asked liberals to fill out the questionaire as though they were a "typical conservative", and asked the conservatives to fill it out as though they were a "typical liberal". The results were amazing. Not only did people think typical or average members of the other party were more extreme than the actual averages, they thought they were more extreme than actual self-reported "extreme liberals" and "extreme conservatives". In other words, liberals think the average conservative is farther right than most people on the actual far right. And vice versa. Not only that, but people think the average on their own side is more extreme than it really is. No wonder we're always accusing each other of being extremists, even though most of us aren't.

Of course, there are real extremists and truly hateful people out there, and that Coke ad flushed some of them out. But any fool with a computer can post on Twitter, so in a country with 300 million people, it's no surprise that you'll be able to find some nasty haters out there. We all knew they were out there, didn't we? What we have to stop doing is thinking a few extremists are typical of everyone on that side of the spectrum. They aren't. If we want to heal the divisions in this country, maybe the first thing we should do is realize we aren't as divided as we think we are.

Judgement, Understanding, and Arguments Among Friends

"Truth springs from argument among friends." - David Hume

Domenico Fetti - The Parable of the Mote and the Beam

Mr. Hume's aphorism may sound a little crazy to modern ears. These days when you hear the word "argument", it usually means something like "verbal combat." In that sense, arguments are as likely to drive friends apart as to uncover truth. But Hume was no fool, and that's not how he was using the word. He meant it in the philosophical sense: a verbal defense of an idea, in which reasons are given for that idea. An argument has a conclusion, as well as one or more reasons given to support it. A claim without reasons is not an argument. It is, as Ambrose Beirce put it, "a vagrant opinion without visible means of support." Many combat-type arguments are a jumble of insults, ridicule, and vagrant opinions; and they may contain no arguments at all in the philosophical sense. Hume was saying that truth springs not from verbal battle, but from civil discussions involving real, reasoned arguments.

I think he's probably right, although I doubt that even the kinds of argument Hume had in mind lead to truth or agreement very often. What's more common is that they lead to mutual understanding. The debaters may not end up agreeing with each other, but at least they learn more about the other person's reasons for thinking the way they do. And that's no small thing.

If you watch most online arguments, though, they seem to turn into the fighting kind more often than the friendly kind, and those don't lead to truth, agreement, understanding, or much of anything except hurt feelings. But it doesn't have to be that way. If people could be more diplomatic, more arguments would lead to understanding, and maybe even truth. I talk about that kind of diplomacy a lot, but I'm really not great at it. The other day, though, I got in a very civil argument with my friend Danny, who really is great at it. I tell him that if there's ever an election for National Political Referee, I'm nominating him. And sure enough, I ended up getting some real insight into how he, as a devout, moderate Christian, sees the world.

At issue was the idea of judgement. Even though I'm agnostic, I think Christianity has given the world some very worthwhile ideas. In particular, the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and the similar Sermon on the Plain in Luke strike me as being full of profound insights and wise advice: blessed are the peacemakers and the merciful, love your neighbor and even your enemies, turn the other cheek, don't be a hypocrite or make a big show of prayer and charity, watch for false prophets and wolves in sheep's clothing, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Sermon on the Mount also contains my favorite lines in the entire Bible: "Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not; neither do they spin. Yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."

These are wise words, and the world would be a better place if more people (Christian and otherwise) followed them. But there are parts of both sermons I can't subscribe to. Turning the other cheek is a powerful idea, which people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King used to help change the world for the better. But I don't think you should turn the other cheek in every situation. What if someone is just going to take that as an invitation to beat you senseless? Then I can't see how there's anything wrong with fighting back, or at least leaving the scene. Turning the other cheek only works if it defuses violence, not if it encourages it. At least, that's how it seems to me.

Then there are the verses on judgement. Here are the ones from Matthew:

7 “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. 2 For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. 3 Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.

The part about taking the log out of your own eye seems like the height of wisdom to me. It's so easy to be a hypocrite, and to see the faults of others more clearly than our own. But how can you truly not judge anybody, ever? I've never been able to make sense of that idea. A while back, I was on a plane, across the aisle from a very drunk pair of friends who seemed to be in the process of falling out forever. One was yelling obscenities at the other. First the other passengers asked him to stop, then the flight attendent, and then the pilot, who told him he was on the verge of getting put off the plane and arrested. That finally shut him up, but not before he looked around and said, "All of you people are JUDGING me!"

We all nodded, like, "Yes, yes we are. Everyone on this plane is judging you. Why shouldn't we?"

Why indeed? Some behaviors are clearly bad, and the people doing them need to stop. How can a society work if we never judged people who are being insufferably rude, not to mention murderers, rapists, and thieves? The only way the verses in Matthew have ever made sense to me is to keep in mind what comes after "Do not judge," which is "so that you may not be judged." That is, don't judge unless you are prepared to be judged yourself, because you aren't perfect either. In other words, "Do not judge" is bound up with the teaching about hypocrisy.

Fair enough. It's certainly wrong for me to judge others without paying attention to my own flaws, or holding myself to the same standard I'm holding them to. If I judge the behavior of the guy on the plane as unacceptable, I should agree that it would be unacceptable if I did it, too. And I do--if I ever act like that, I hope somebody tosses me off that plane. But to say "Do not judge. Period"...how can that ever work in practice? You can't just let people run around being horrible, can you?

That's what I was asking Danny. I had shared an article called Ten Things You Can't Say While Following Jesus, because I was interested in seeing what some of my Christian friends thought about it. I mostly agreed with the article, not necessarily with the Christian perspective, but with the idea that saying things like "Everything happens for a reason" and "God never gives us more than we can handle" might not make a lot of sense. But one of the things the author took issue with is people saying "It's OK to judge." As I said, I think it's not only OK to judge sometimes; it's downright unavoidable. Danny was with the author of the article, though, saying that it's OK to judge only if you are God, and none of us are God. He went on to say, "The very thought that the sinner who is in church is somehow qualified to judge the sinner who is outside of it is completely false and goes against Jesus' teachings."

When I explained why I think judgement is unavoidable, he said:

I believe that a Christian's responsibility is to work on their own sin issues and just extend love to others. I look at it as a big enough job to manage my own sins without trying to focus on other's sins...that's between them and God. Now, I don't always succeed in not judging but I try not to. 

I feel like there is a lot of judgement of others by the Christian community and not nearly enough focus internally. I guess it's a lot easier to focus on others' sin than to try to fix ours. I also think the "lest ye be judged" part means that we should remember that we will be judged one day so we might want to extend the same grace and forgiveness that we hope for from God. I guess I also just wonder what value is to be gained from judgement. I figure it's just a big waste of time and energy that pushes people away from God.

Well put, but that didn't really address my question about how you deal with those who are behaving unacceptably. I said, "I guess a lot of this depends on the definition of judgement. I'm just saying we all have to judge people in the sense of saying 'that behavior is bad, and you need to stop it.' It doesn't necessarily mean 'I judge them a bad and irredeemable person.' I mean, I certainly have my own failings to attend to, but if I see, for example, someone being cruel to an animal, then I'm going to attend to their failing, too. And you would too, I'm thinking. We surely have slightly different interpretations of judgement going on here.

His response:

Yes...two different judgements. I make judgements every day in the way you mean. I was thinking more along the lines of judging them to be irredeemable, and that their sin is somehow worse than others, and that God is less willing/able to forgive. Also the idea that somehow he leaves us (Christians) to the task of deciding who is and is not redeemable. You are correct in that evangelicals (including me) believe that everyone sins as none of us is perfect. Some evangelicals (not me) also chose to believe that their sin is somehow less serious and more likely to be forgiven than other people's sin. This contradicts my understanding of the Bible. These are the evangelicals who drive people away from God and church.

That cleared it up for me. I finally understood how he, and probably many other Christians, see Jesus' admonition not to judge. It does mean, "Do not judge at all," if by judgment you mean, "You are a sinner and I am not." It doesn't mean you can never say someone's behavior is unacceptable. Those are two different kinds of judgment. Christians believe we are all fallen beings, born with original sin and thus undeserving of salvation, and that only by God's grace can we be saved. Within the context of those beliefs, "Do not judge...period" makes sense, at least when it comes to judging who is a sinner. It had seemed nonsensical to me, but that's because I wasn't looking at it through a Christian lens. Now I understood where he was coming from, and the Christian view of judgement is a lot clearer to me.

I still don't agree with him completely. I can't, without believing in the Christian framework of original sin, heaven and hell, and salvation through grace. But that's not the point here. The point is that two people with very different worldviews were able to have a civil discussion that actually led to understanding and clarity. I left with a better understanding of how another intelligent person sees the world, and I like to think he did too. We're probably never going to agree completely, and that's fine. But it's nice to know we can at least understand each other a little better, and that some online arguments are worth having.